Between the Lines
by MarySuuuue
Summary: This is the Mary Sue I had to get out of my system: Cadet Sverak has to find her path in life on the lower decks of Enterprise. And no, she does not get to save the universe.
1. Present, part 1

A problem every spacefaring civilization has to come to terms with, once its members have left the confines of their homeworld and turned their gaze upwards to the stars, is the vastness of space. Distances that have seemed considerable before are dwarfed by the boundless stretches of nothingness that lie between two neighboring suns. The planet that houses their entire civilization, their cradle, their haven in the hostile vacuum that surrounds them, is but a grain of sand lost in the endless depths of the universe.

But people of every species adapt, and as they begin to explore the new possibilities that are now open to them, as they master the seemingly unsurmountable distances with more and more sophisticated vessels, space loses its terror and the unimaginable becomes an everyday procedure.

In the 24th century, few people in the United Federation of Planets are still aware of the magnitude of the step a civilization takes when it ventures into deep space. There are mining ships big enough to acommodate whole asteroids, vessels that carry hundreds, even thousands of people across the galaxy. And there are starbases to give them berth, a web of giant metal towers spread across the whole Federation territory. But although people have grown up with those tremendous technical achievements, although they take them for granted, there is a sensation of awe inspired in all of those who happen to be present when Starbase 77 opens its huge spacedoors to admit yet another ship into its dock. For a moment, conversation dies, and all eyes turn to see Enterprise coasting to her berth.

* * *

Captain Jean-Luc Picard sat on the sofa in his ready room and looked up from the reports he had been contemplating to notice that they were clearing the spacedock doors. There was no need for him to be present on the bridge during the docking procedures, Commander Riker was more than capable of handling everything. Enterprise would have to spend several days in spacedock so that the damage she had sustained during their encounter with the quantum singularity lifeforms could be repaired.

The view outside the porthole into the space station indicated that Enterprise had slowed. The ship shuddered almost imperceptibly and came to a halt. Almost instantaneously, Picard saw small worker-bees detatch themselves from the walls and approach the ship. Repairs would be effectuated immediately, Picard noted with satisfaction. From one side a long silvery tube was approaching the ship to provide a passage from the starbase to the ship. Before long it would be filled with crewmen glad to seize the opportunity of taking shore leave.

This reminded Picard of another matter he had to attend to. He put down the PADD containing the damage reports, shuffled through the dangerously high stack of PADDs on his desk and finally found the one he was looking for. The updated crew list. New personnel that had been dispatched to the Enterprise was due to come aboard soon, and as the captain it was his duty to familiarize himself at least with their files, if not necessarily with the people. He sometimes regretted the fact that, being the captain of so big a ship, he could not possibly become acquainted with everyone in person but only with a very selected circle instead.

Absentmindedly sipping a cup of Earl Grey tea, Picard's eyes idly scanned the colums of crewmembers listed according to rank until he came to the end of the list. There would be three ensigns transferred from the USS Hood to the Enterprise: the Human Sam Lavelle, the Vulcan Taurik, and one ensign fresh out of the Academy at his own request, the Bajoran Sito Jaxa. That was where the list should have ended. But it didn't. At the very bottom another name figured: Cadet Sverak. Captain Picard nearly choked on his tea. It was highly unusual for Starfleet to send cadets to starships. They might participate in training cruises on special ships but hardly ever in deep space assignments, simply because this meant a severe disruption of their training. Starfleet had never sent a cadet to the Enterprise before, and there had to be a very good reason for this, a reason Picard was determined to find out.

Picard put down his tea cup and activated the small computer interface on his desk to state his request.

"Computer, call up the file of Cadet Sverak. Vocal output."

The computer responded with a few faint clicks, and Captain Picard leaned back to listen as the computer started to speak.

"Sverak. Current rank: Cadet, Third Class. Current assignment: Midshipman, Starship USS Enterprise, NCC 1701-D. Date of birth: 2352, no further specifications. Parents: T'Lara and Silek of Vulcan. Place of Birth: DeghwI'Qagh III…"

That was where Picard, who had become more and more intrigued, first interrupted the matter-of-fact voice of the ship's computer.

"Specify whereabouts of place of birth." The name DeghwI'Qagh III sounded familiar to him, it nagged at this memory although he could not quite place it.

"Planet in the DeghwI'Qagh System near the Romulan Neutral Zone. Site of archeological excavations until Stardate 28723.5, when the planet was devastated. The USS Stargazer was unable to retrieve any of the archaeologists."

So that was it. Picard dimly remembered the desperate rescue mission when all they came upon on the planet's surface was a raging inferno. All colonists as well as their families had been presumed dead - prematurely, as it would appear. He was eager to hear more.

"Continue."

"Entered Starfleet Academy in 2368. Age: 18. Biographical data: Was brought to the Romulan Empire together with 12 other Vulcan children shortly after the incident on DeghwI'Qagh III…"

Picard's head snapped around. He could hardly believe his ears. He could not possibly have overlooked 12 Vulcan children, and what had the Romulans been doing there in the first place?

"Computer, how did this happen?"

"Starfleet reports indicate that the group was most likely rescued by a Romulan intruder…"

"Specify", Picard snapped.

"No other data available."

Picard inhaled deeply, and picked up his tea. "Very well. Continue."

"Adopted by a Romulan Commander and released in 2363 as a result of newly upcoming trade negotiations between the Federation and the Romulan Empire, brought to Vulcan."

The computer stopped. Picard cradled the half-filled cup of tea in his hand and leaned back, lost in thoughts.

* * *

Sverak stood so close to the huge windows of Starbase 77 that enabled visitors to get a look inside the main docking bay that her breath condensed on the thick transparent aluminium. She didn't care. When the huge doors opened to admit the Enterprise, Sverak involuntarily drew in a deep breath.

"It will turn out all right", said a sympathetic voice next to her. Sverak looked at her friend, and for a moment an expression of resignation crept over her face.

"On the contrary, Kim, I do not think it will be all right at all. This is no opportunity for me to prove myself in any way or to help me with my choice of career but for Starfleet to expel me once and for all. Good riddance of a nuisance, to put it into good Standard."

The blonde woman standing next to Sverak shook her curls empathically. "You're much too gloomy for someone who is supposed to show no emotions at all", she chided gently. "Look at me. If Starfleet really wants to get rid of someone they send him to a Constellation class ship that should have been decommissioned years ago and is scheduled for frontier duty instead. I would love to be in your place."

Sverak looked at her friend for a moment, her face displaying no emotions at all, then turned back to face the windows. "In that case maybe we should get extensive plastic surgery done and switch places."

Her friend laughed. "Maybe we should."

"I am not even sure anymore if I want to be in Starfleet", Sverak said dejectedly. "So far, I have tried to ignore all hostilities directed at me. I thought that if I worked hard enough, I would soon be accepted without questions about where I came from. I think I might have been wrong and it would be better if I just quit."

The blonde woman spun around, grabbing the Vulcan by the arms.

"Shut up! You're just too stubborn! It is an honour to serve aboard the Enterprise, no matter how you came by it! You should ask yourself what made you deserve this and count yourself lucky not to be stuck on a flying death trap like me! Ensign Kim Shapiro bound for the stars in a bucket of bolts! Honestly!"

Sverak, who had endured this outburst stoically, now took a step back to free herself. "I do not think that this is in good faith."

Her friend threw up her arms in defeat. "You're hopeless! Let's get packed" she stated and walked away, leaving the Vulcan to stare mutely at her back, then follow her.

* * *

"About ten years! Raised by Romulans, taught the Romulan way of life, the Romulan way of thinking …" Riker shook his head. "Starfleet must have had second thoughts about admitting her to the Academy."

"Indeed", Picard replied. He was pacing his Ready Room, with Riker comfortably seated in front of the captain's desk. "This is a bit of an awkward situation Starfleet is putting us in, Number One."

The commander nodded.

"From what you've told me, it seems obvious that Starfleet doesn't quite know what to do with her and now leaves that up to us." He shook his head slightly. "We're a galaxy class starship, not a kindergarten."

Picard stopped his pacing and turned to his first officer, his lips curved slightly upwards in a faint smile. "Well. We do have a kindergarten, Number One. She's the first Romulan in Starfleet, at least as close to a Romulan as you can possibly get. Unusual situations call for unusual measures. Put her where she can do no harm and we'll see."

* * *

"You know what I like about Vulcans? They have the perfect poker face, inscrutable and unmoving. And yet, I've never met a people more predictable than them because for them there is only one logical course of action." Sam Lavelle turned to face Taurik who had listened to his rant with his usual composed expression. "Right or not, Taurik?"

"That is correct", Taurik stated flatly.

"Speaking of poker... have you ever been introducted to the game?" Sam asked innocently, with a gleam in his eye.

Both Sito and Taurik shook their heads.

"Well then..." Sam clasped his hands. "I suggest we find our quarters - Taurik's and mine that is - and I'll show you."

They all headed for the next turbolift.

* * *

As soon as Sverak materialized, she knew she was on a starship. In the back of her mind she felt that mixture of emotions that was typical on a starship. Pride, curiosity, a certain hardiness maybe. People were different on a starship, no matter which race. For a moment, she felt almost elated.

She stepped down from the transporter platform, towards the ensign waiting for her.

"Permission to come aboard."

He nodded impatiently. "Granted. I will take you to your quarters first and then to Commander Riker. You're new, so he wants to have a word with you, and he'll probably tell you which section you're assigned to. Follow me."

He turned without waiting for her acknowledgement and headed out. Sverak trodded after him, down the corridors of her new home. Temporary, she reminded herself, and probably not for long.

They came to a turbolift and stepped inside.

"Deck 17."

The turbolift accelerated smoothly. The ensign did not seem to be in a mood for talking, and Sverak did not venture any topics of conversation either, so they made the trip in silence. Finally, the turbolift stopped moving, the doors opened and Sverak followed the ensign out into the corridor. They passed identical doors to either side of the corridor until they came to cabin 19, which already had the names "Ensign Jamie Quinn" and "Cadet Sverak" on it. Inside, Sverak was pleased to see that even for the lower ranks, or lowest, in her case, the cabin was anything but cramped, with two well separated beds but also room for chairs, a table, and plenty of space to stow away her things. Sverak threw her duffle bag onto the clearly unused bed, then turned and followed the ensign back out to their next destination.

"Bridge."

They stepped out of the turbolift onto the brown carpet. Sverak looked around with interest. She had seen similar bridges in simulations, but seeing it on a real ship was something else. It was spacious, with beige as the dominating colour. Not a warship at all. Only the ops station was manned, a crewmember was effecutating repairs on one of the aft stations.

The ensign left her little time for contemplation. Instead, he beckoned her to follow him, and led her down the ramp to what had to be the door to the Ready Room. He pressed a button, and just a few seconds later the reply came from within.

"Come."

The ensign marched straight on, the doors opening to grant him entrance. Sverak followed suit. They both stood to attention in front of a desk where a tall, bulky Human with a dark beard sat. Sverak recognised the face. Commander Riker, first officer on the starship Enterprise. She stole a glimpse to the left of Commander Riker and did a double take, when she saw a colourful fish swimming around in some sort of aquarium.

The ensign spoke first. "Cadet Sverak has arrived, sir."

Riker nodded. "Thank you, ensign. You're dismissed."

The ensign turned and was out, leaving Sverak still standing to attention. Riker stared at her for a long moment, but Sverak withstood his scrutiny without blinking. Sometimes she was even beginning to be thankful for her Vulcan training. Finally, Riker blinked and leaned back, pushing himself back from the desk with one hand.

"Cadet Sverak. Welcome aboard Enterprise. I've had a look at your grades from first year, congratulations on your performance. Starfleet in their infinite wisdom thinks that at this stage you could benefit from extended onboard training rather than more theory, so here we are. You're on the Engineering track and we'll get you into that department, but you are in an early stage of your training. We will rotate you through a bit of Enterprise's various departments for you to get a broader experience in case you would still like to adjust your track."

It was not quite a question but he still looked at her expectantly. Sverak, who had not had any expectations whatsoever, gave a cut "Yessir."

Riker gave her a brief smile, then handed her a PADD. "Your first assignment is to xenobiology in the department of Lieutenant S'keet, more details are on the padd. Be ready to report for duty tomorrow, beta shift. Dismissed."

And that was it. Sverak took the PADD from Commander Riker's hand, gave another "Yessir" for good measure, and was out of the room to start her new life on Enterprise.


	2. Present, part 2

A voice made Sverak snap out of her meditation. It was not a friendly tone. It took Sverak a moment to become fully aware of her surroundings. For a moment, she did not quite know where she was, but then reality reasserted itself. Enterprise. Her room. And probably her roommate. Sverak's nictitating membrane swept back, and she sat up from her replicated meditation stone to find a female Human looming over her. The Human stared at her as if she expected some kind of answer.

"Please restate your question." Sverak said in what she hoped was a reasonably neutral tone.

"I said, these are my quarters as well and I can't stand this smell, whatever it is."

Sverak looked down at her meditation lamp. It had been overthrown, its contents now seeping into the carpet. "It seems my meditation lamp offended you. I will endeavour to use it sparingly in the future."

"See that you do, Romulan!" the Human spat at her, her voice laced with contempt.

Sverak regarded her evenly. Inside, she felt cold. "You seem to know me very well. In that case, no further introductions are necessary. You have successfully prevented my meditation lamp from emitting any more 'smells', so allow me to get back to my meditation." Not even waiting for an answer, she walked over to her bunk, lay down and let the nictitating membrane cover her eyes.

Whatever she had expected on the ship, this was worse. Dealing with concealed resentment from a few was one thing. Feeling her mental shields being bombarded by open hatred was quite another, and Sverak was not sure how long she would be able to maintain control. In the following days she spent her off-duty hours in the gym, in the holodeck or in the library, and, since her work in xenobiology mostly consisted of nothing more exciting than labelling and sorting specimen, keeping up with the latest developments in Warp drive technology, avoiding her quarters and Ensign Quinn whenever she could.

* * *

Sverak ran across uneven ground. Her eyes fixed on the muddy track, her legs pumping, her hands clenching a phaser rifle, her face set in grim determination, her ears picking up signals from her pursuers not far behind, she ran.

The sun was setting quickly on the alien world, and an eerie red light illuminated the horizon. If she could make it to the forest in time, that dark mass looming in front of her, tantalizingly close, she might have a chance to confuse her pursuers if their night vision was worse than hers. Her universal translator had been the first thing to go, closely followed by her communicator. The shrill sounds of alien language behind her hurt her ears and held all the more menace as their meaning was undecipherable.

Things were not supposed to be the way they were. This world was supposed to be uninhabited and she was supposed to bring in a few perfectly harmless samples of soil and indigenous plants for the xenobiology department to have something to work with. The alien party had appeared more or less out of nowhere. Huge, reptilian beings in uniforms the colour of mud. They moved like spirits, silently and almost too fast for the eye to follow. They were large enough, Enterprise should have had them on the sensors. Even more importantly, Enterprise should have beamed the accompanying security officer, Ensign Sito, and her up at the first sign of trouble. Instead, the aliens had come down on Sito as she was helping Sverak with the geological survey and had held her to the ground. They had almost managed to overwhelm Sverak as well, but she had managed to surprise them with her strength, which had allowed her to break free of their grip, and escape.

Without a communicator to contact the ship, however, that was a temporary victory at best. The aliens' physical strength more than matched her own, and they were gaining ground. So she ran. The sun had almost vanished behind the horizon, and night was falling. The darkness of the forest seemed to spread out into the grassland and call out to her, mockingly. The sky above her was rapidly turning dark blue with the first stars sprinkled across as bright dots. One of them was the Enterprise, Sverak thought, wistfully.

She clamped down on her growing frustration and fury, retaining only some of it to propel her forward even faster. The shrill cries were closer behind. But still she refused to give up, still she ran on. By now all sunlight had vanished and what little starlight there was barely managed to illuminate the ground. In a way, she was not even surprised when she feld her foot catch on something, felt herself trip, then fall and hit the ground that smelled of mud and grass and life. She did not try to get up. Instead, she turned around on her back to look at the stars. The sounds got louder until they filled the air around her and she could hear nothing else. Sverak never looked at the creatures, she held her eyes fixed on a fast moving point of light and allowed herself a pang of regret. Then darkness, as it settled around her.

She opened her eyes to bright sunlight. A gentle breeze caressed her face. She was lying on her back, small pebbles dug into her skin through the fabric of her uniform, the sound of buzzing insects filled her ears. She took an experimental breath. The air was sweet and dry, heavy with the fragrances of flowers and hay. Her hands closed around tufts of grass. When she turned her head slowly, carefully, she saw Ensign Sito lying next to her, fast asleep. She took in a deep breath, then another. And another. Wild joy bubbled up inside of her and escaped as pearls of laughter until she was once more quiet inside.

Ensign Sito muttered and turned in her sleep. Sverak sat up. She was once again back at the beamsite. The sky was blue, the grass was green, the dark forest was far away. She tapped her uniform where her communicator was supposed to be, but her hands only touched synthetic fabric. She frowned, got up and went to Ensign Sito to slap her communicator instead.

"Sverak to Enterprise."

Sito opened his eyes, looking around in a state of utter confusion. The communicator remained silent.

"Sverak to Enterprise!"

"This is Enterprise. Where the hell have you been!"

"Where the hell have YOU been." Sverak muttered under her breath. When she looked around for the sample container, it was nowhere to be seen, contrary to the phaser rifle, which lay neatly at Sito's side. Aloud she said: "We seem to have been retained by aliens, sir. They have left us at the original beam site. Unfortunately, the container with the samples seems to have vanished. If the xenobiology department still requires those samples, we will need a second container. Sir." she added, to make it sound more polite.

"A search party is looking for you. Remain where you are. They will reach you shortly," was the terse reply.

Sverak set back down, face held in general direction of the sun, eyes closed. She basked in the gentle warmness that chased the darkness out of her bones and her mind.

"What was that?" Sito's voice cut through the silence like a knife.

"I do not know. I ran, they caught up with me, and afterwards... nothing. The first thing I remember is waking up here."

"The only thing I remember is being jumped by something and then waking up here. Who caught up with you?" Sito said, bewildered.

"Aliens, I presume. Reptilian-like and moving very fast. I cannot give you any more information," she said slowly. When she tried to conjure up in her mind what she had seen yesterday, she found that the images were already fading, and for a brief moment she wondered if it had been real.

Sounds of feet approaching. She got up. Riker led the party. She waited for them to arrive, not trusting her legs to carry her forward. Riker stopped two metres in front of her and looked at her with an odd expression in his eyes. She remained silent. Finally, he started to speak.

"Shortly after you had beamed down, a heavy ion storm swept over the beam spot. There was a lethal amount of electric discharge on the surface. We tried to reach you but the atmospheric interference was too strong. We couldn't beam you out either. We thought you were dead. Until fifteen minutes ago, there were no lifesigns on the planet. Where have you been?"

She eyes him thoughtfully. "We were surprised by aliens. Then we woke up here. I cannot remember anything that happened in between, sir."

He gave her another long, hard stare, then tapped his communicator. "Six to beam up."

* * *

Sverak spent that following night in meditation. She had had to endure a complete check-up in sickbay. Writing a report of what had transpired on the surface of that planet had taken her considerably less time. The only reasonable explanation Sverak had been able to come up with was that the aliens had actually saved them from the storm, and that they had done so by taking Ensign Sito and her underground where the minerals in the rocks had shielded them from Enterprise's sensors.

When she had called up the scans of the surface, she had not found any caves nearby, in fact, there were no cavities in the rock where they could have been hidden. Ensign Sito's report had done even less to explain the incident than hers, however, and the xenobiology department head had told her that, following the incident, the recommendation to Starfleet would be to declare the planet as unsafe until a proper research ship could carry a out more thorough survey. Sverak nodded politely to that and messaged her friend as soon as she could. When she had finished recounting the event, Kim looked as incredulous as it was possible for her on the tiny screen of the PADD.

"So that's it? Noone knows anything about what really happened and this is how it's always gonna be?"

Sverak nodded. "That's it. Which only goes to show that even in the 24th century there are a few secrets left in the universe."

"How are you feeling?"

Sverak had given that particular question a lot of thought in meditation.

"I feel humbled. The aliens, whatever they were, did save our lives. It made me appreciate being alive afterwards."

"Having second thoughts about joining Starfleet again?"

"Less so, actually. I am curious to discover what else is out there."

* * *

Sito sat at a table in Ten Forward, surrounded by her friends. She was still shaken by the experience on the planet, elated to be alive, and frazzled because while there had certainly been cause for concern after waking up, she had not actually had time to be afraid on the planet, considering the speed with which everything had happened. She was secure in the knowledge that not even Lieutenant Worf had found any fault with her behavior. She knew, from sometimes bitter experience, that the feeling of helplessness that she now experienced would fade with time, and that this process would be the more quicker the less she actively delved on whether she could have done anything differently. So she refused to discuss her away mission any more than strictly necessary with her friends. The Vulcan cadet had suprised her, though.

"Taurik, do you know her?"

Taurik shook his head. "No."

"She's, what, class of 2372? If so, what is she even doing here?" Sam mused.

Taurik inclined his head, looking like a puzzled bird, although Sito would never tell him that to his face. "I believe that she holds both Vulcan and Romulan citizenship."

"How is that even possible? She definitely looks Vulcan. Why would Starfleet let her join in the first place? Is that why she is here?"

Sito was as surprised by that tidbit of information as Sam and Alyssa Ogawa, but since noone seemed to know anything their conversation soon turned to other topics.


	3. Present, part 3

While her onboard assignment turned out to be overall better than she could have hoped for, her rooming situation was considerably less optimal. Sverak found herself delving more into Vulcan mental control techniques than she had ever imagined, even in her worst nightmares about attending the Vulcan Science Academy. Her mental shields continued to be battered by anger, mistrust and open dislike emanating from her cabin mate, and her patience was becoming even more frayed.

While her roommate experience left Sverak more baffled than anything else, something had to be done. Sverak did, on the whole, enjoy challenges, but she did not relish the perpetual need for mental control. Her shields were considerably weakened as it was, and while she could have performed her duty in the xenobiology department with ten percent of her available brain cells, she did not particularly want to Cause an Incident that would cut her Starfleet experience shorter than it was destined to be. Not to mention the fact that there was no logical reason to believe that the Romulan age of majority trick might work a second time. After all, there had been no logical reason to believe that it it would work the first time.

Sverak endured for exactly eight more duty shifts, until deciding that this simply was not acceptable. So she resolved to bend a little and requested a re-assignment to the astrometrics lab team of gamma shift. Since the easiest way was avoidance, and putting in a request for a new cabinmate had a lower possibility of being approved, Sverak, who by then had become surprisingly adept at scouting out the quiet nooks and crannies of the starship Enterprise, stowed away in a remote corner of the hydroponics lab during her off-duty hours and composed a concise message to both lieutenants in charge of xenobiology during beta and astrometrics during gamma shift in order to request being transferred, her main and compelling argument being that the reduced staffing of the astrometrics lab during gamma shift would be able to make her contribution more valuable, which, in the end, was a more efficient use of ship resources. The irony that she could have had obtained a whole four-year degree on this at the Vulcan Science Academy was not lost on her, training in the Vulcan disciplines of the mind or not. The request was approved on the following day, and Sverak experienced a very welcome feeling of satisfaction that she did not even bother to address in the subsequent meditation, which, incidentally, was blissfully Quinn-free.

* * *

Sverak grabbed the PADD that Lieutenant Kurr extended to her by reflex. The Tellarite looked disgruntled, but then again given his facial structure he probably did not have much choice in that.

"We'll put that brain of yours to a small test. This is a publication describing some hypothesis on the role of the toroidal magnetic fields in the production of gravitational waves in magnetars. Prove or disprove it based on the data Enterprise collected over the course of its journey."

With that, he turned and left, and Sverak, after a brief mental review of what she knew about magnetars in general and the role of toroidal magnetic fields in particular (surprisingly little), switched on the PADD, turned to her station and got to work.

It took her eight hours of Gamma shift to brush up on her astrophysics background, understand the publication and formulate a few hypotheses of her own on how to use the existing data to test the assumption. During alpha shift, she went to the gym and afterwards spent a few quiet hours in the hydroponics bay. And when beta shift came along and brought an empty quarter, most of its eight hours were spent in meditation and in blissful silence.

Sverak slept and meditated in ensign Quinn's absence, had her own shift just afterwards and simply avoided the cabin altogether during Quinn's sleep cycle, which coincided with the alpha shift. They saw each other for five, maybe ten minutes per day, which Sverak found perfectly acceptable.

* * *

"So you joined the nerds of gamma shift?"

Sverak eyed the image of her friend on the computer screen with exasperation.

"There is a reasonable chance that I can obtain credits for my second year astrophysics course this way."

Her friend just smiled. Sverak sighed.

"And yes, I did join the nerds. Lieutenant Kurr drinks from a coffee cup with the print 'real astrophysicists are not limited to binary systems'."

Sverak rolled her eyes, Kim winced in sympathy.

"That's bad."

"It is. And Ensign g'Hama constantly chews Bhana leaves when she has to analyze the long range sensor data. She says it helps her think even though it makes her look like a bovine. Her words, not mine."

Kim laughed. "Still sounds more fun than my on-ship assignment. Operations continues to be more boring than I thought. I might rethink my specialization after all."

Sverak permitted herself a small smile. "I am thinking of a way to tell you 'I told you so' without sounding like my foster parents."

"What about you, anyway? If you find sifting through astrometric data so gratifying, maybe the Vulcan Science Academy would have been a better fit after all?"

Sverak, who had, on occasion, harbored this treacherous thought herself, scowled.

"I am still on the engineering track, first of all, and second, there are preciously few departments where they let second year cadets contribute to more than replicating coffee. It was the logical choice."

Kim waited, grinning expectantly. Sverak contemplated resisting but then had to admit defeat.

"I am considering switching to science track," she admitted with some reluctance. "But I have not yet come to a final decision."

Kim smiled triumphantly, then groaned. "Well, my shift starts in 30 minutes and I still have to get ready. Take care, talk to you soon!"

Sverak waved her goodbyes and grabbed several PADDs for some reading during her customary trips to the ship's quiet corners during ensign Quinn's rest period, followed by a trip to the gym and, if she could manage, some time on the holodeck.

* * *

After a week of her new routine, Sverak felt that she had attained an almost Vulcan level of equanimity. She had disproved the paper's assumption on day 5 at her new station and was rewarded with a new publication on how to estimate a black hole's mass and spin through the position of the jet boundary shape break from Lieutenant Kurr as well as her very own mug filled with Rohin'qua tea, shyly pushed over the computer terminal separating their adjacent stations by Ensign Gonaqua. Sverak figured that a smile to thank her would be more frightening than reassuring and nodded gravely instead, just to get an equally solemn nod in return.

Her Starfleet experience now seemed to consist of sifting through staggering amounts of astrophysics data and reading as well as writing scientific publications, and Sverak felt a pang of disgust at realizing how much she thrived in this. On the one hand it made her decision whether to stay in Starfleet and what track to pursue much, much easier. On the other hand, she could not entirely suppress the feeling of dread at the next vidcall with her friend and a new round of I-told-you-so. But the second week into her new post she got invited to the gamma shift's Racketball-and-Poker events and decided that some things simply had to be worth the hassle.

At the beginning of her sixth week on Enterprise she communicated her intention to focus on a Science track to her Starfleet advisor and replicated her own T-Shirt with Maxwell's equations and the subtitle "… and there was light". A pity she had to wear it at the exact moment when Kim called.

"You did what?"

Sverak suppressed the urge to hide her face behind her mug of Rohin'qua tea – her third today, she strongly suspected she was developing an addiction and resolved to ask in Sickbay about potential negative effects on the Vulcan physiology – and put on her most emotionless face.

"I changed my Starfleet track to science."

"And became an uber-nerd in the process. Sverak! You've only been away for six weeks! Where is your dignity?"

"It was the logical choice", Sverak said solemly.

"Can you just listen to yourself talking! Well who am I kidding. It was probably inevitable, you being Vulcan and all. But six bloody weeks! I thought it would take you longer than that at least!"

Kim paused mid-rant and just looked at Sverak, head tilted. "Are you happy at least?"

Sverak gave that question some thought, then nodded. "I believe I am."

Kim smiled and shrugged. "Then that is all there is to it."

* * *

"She switched to Science track? Seems she could have had that on Vulcan as well. But then again, it's what most of our Vulcans do, cannot find fault with that."

Admiral Tyler's face stared at Riker from the ready room screen. He looked somewhat pinched, but then again that was what he had always looked like, so Riker chose not to put too much stock into that. Had they expected their cadet to wreak havoc on Enterprise? In Riker's opinion Sverak had blended in so completely that she has become indistinguishable from the tapestry but he kept that to himself. Instead, he nodded. "Her work is excellent. She integrates well into the team and Lieutenant Kurr has nothing but praise for her astrophysics skills." And Lieutenant Kurr being a Tellarite this could not have been easy.

"That is good to hear but not exactly what we hoped to learn by putting her on a starship."

"Well she is shaping up to be quite an asset to the Science Corps of Starfleet, which is almost boringly Vulcan, and the only thing she has been a danger to so far is the onboard Rohin'qua tea stash. But since this seems to be the current fad in astrophysics in general it would be unfair to single her out for that."

"Thank you for that assessment, Commander Riker. While boring is actually good in my opinion, others are still hoping for more, so by all means, let's talk again some time."

* * *

Sverak left her post at the end of her shift quenching a feeling of what had to be elation at the fact that she had, indeed, found a black hole having characteristics exactly as predicted by her latest theory - the emotion that felt very unfamiliar to her. The corridors were bustling with people, but Sverak was too full of her own emotions to be able to sense very much from anyone else. It was possible that scientists tended to be far too much interested in their work to harbor resentment against someone for having been affiliated with the Romulan Empire at some point. Sverak certainly was accepted as part of this particular group, her colleagues were easy to get along with, and she found herself seriously considering a career in scientific research in Starfleet. Maybe she could interrupt her Starfleet training to finish a scientific degree first. She allowed herself a mental snort. Yeah, right.

In any case, Sverak felt she deserved a treat, and since it was alpha shift and Ten Forward was at its busiest during beta shift, she felt secure enough to venture into an area she usually avoided. A turbolift brought her to the right deck, and sure enough, she had a number of tables to chose from. So she ambled towards one of the tables close to the huge observation windows and sat down. A waiter came to take her order, and although she had not come here with the intention of consuming anything, she placed an order on a whim.

"A cup of Vulcan spice tea, please." This was as close to a favourite Romulan beverage of hers as she would get.

A completely unfamiliar voice said close to her right ear: "Maybe you should try this instead."

Sverak gave a violent start and was halfway out of her seat to attack, but a hand was placed firmly onto her shoulder, and she was pressed back into her seat with surprising strength. A glass with a milky white liquid was placed in front of her. Sverak turned around, more slowly this time. Behind her chair was a dark-skinned woman, shrouded in a huge violet garment and wearing a hat in matching colours. Not a hat, she corrected herself, a Hat, perching on her head like a giant saucer section.

The woman smiled under Sverak's gaze. She glid around the table and sat down opposite from Sverak.

"Allow me to introduce myself. I am Guinan, the hostess of Ten Forward."

Sverak stared at her for another second. There were few sentient beings that Sverak could not sense. While she was only a passable touch telepath, she was actually a more than halfway decent empath, and even with her shields firmly in place she could usually sense the presence of each and every sentient being in her immediate vicinity. In this case it was as if this Guinan was not even there. Sverak was thoroughly spooked, so she answered carefully. "I am cadet Sverak. What is this beverage called?"

"Go on and taste it." Guinan gestured to the still untouched glass.

Sverak lifted the glass and, against her better judgement, took an experimental sip. Then she had to close her eyes as the all too familiar taste exploded on her taste buds and brought a flood of memories with it.

"This is Venaada juice", she finally said when she thought that her voice would remain steady, opening her eyes again and staring at Guinan. "This is all very nice and touching, but who are you?"

Guinan smiled. "My species is called the El-Aurians, but there are so preciously few left of us at this point that this is of little relevance. Here, I tend bar and I listen. Nothing more, nothing less."

Sverak chose to accept this as the only truth she would get, then nodded. "I thank you for your gift."

"You're welcome and now you know where to come for more."

With that, Guinan retreated as suddenly as she had come. But Sverak was not left to enjoy her beverage alone for long. She looked up, when she felt another presence approaching, so see a Bajoran coming to stand beside her table. Ensign Sito Jaxa, who looked and felt friendly enough. "May I join you?"

Sverak nodded with her mouth full and indicated the place across from her with her free hand. Sito sat.

"I've never seen you here before so I thought I'd just say hello. Well, that, and ask if you've had any more interesting experiences in the xenobiology department."

"My xenobiology experiences ended when I switched to the gamma shift in the astrometrics lab."

That seemed to surprise Sito. "Why, did they get rid of you because we managed to displace one sample container when we were abducted by aliens?"

Sverak snorted at that, then shook her head. "I requested the transfer. My roommate is rather antagonistic, so my aim was to de-synchronize our schedules and minimize our interactions."

Sito seemed taken aback by this. "Why didn't you talk to the quartermaster, or to anyone, really, since this is not something that should be allowed to continue?"

Sverak unsuccessfully tried to keep the incredulous look off her face. "If that is not something that should be allowed to continue then I should have basically had my own room at the Academy. Maybe you've heard the rumours."

"Rumours say you're both Vulcan and Romulan."

"Rumours are correct."

And that's where the latent hostility should have started, but surprisingly, Sverak only continued to feel mild curiosity emanating from the Bajoran, who continued to give her a friendly smile.

"You don't have dibs on obnoxious roommates, by the way. Mine is a Gorn whose snores. The silencing field mutes the sound but she actually makes the bulkheads resonate so I can feel it throughout the night. But she's otherwise quite nice."

And so they continued to talk for some time before Sverak had to leave for her allotted holodeck time. Guinan watched them go and smiled.


	4. Present, part 4

Sverak considered herself pretty clever with regards to the arrangement she had found for herself and her unpleasant cabin mate, however, barely two weeks had passed before she found herself revising that assessment. Whatever rumour had made its way onto the lower decks had indicated that an overuse of warp drive engines had created subspace rifts in their section of space. Sverak, who had spent her shift using all sensors at her disposal to characterize the subspace instabilities they had encountered, was in the observation lounge on deck six when the first shockwave shook the Enterprise on its way to a rescue operation for the medical transport _Fleming_. And while she managed to extricate herself from her vantage point close to one of the huge windows, she was not quite fast enough for the next, more severe shockwave. Sverak never saw what hit her.

* * *

She opened her eyes to find Dr. Crusher hovering over her, waving one of her instruments at Sverak's midsection. When the doctor saw that Sverak was awake, she smiled.

"Welcome back. You're almost as good as new, except for a few days of rest. Hold still for another moment."

Sverak complied, and after a few seconds Dr. Crusher shut off her instrument.

"You'll be happy to know that you're discharged to your quarters until I can clear you for light duty."

Sverak groaned inwardly. Staying in her quarters for a longer period of time was exactly what she had tried to avoid.

"May I undertake trips to the arboretum?" she enquired carefully.

The doctor gave her a long stare. "No, you may not. Stay in bed and see me tomorrow at 0800 hours."

Sverak gave a curt "Yessir", hopped down from the biobed and walked out of Sickbay, assessing her state. Superficially, her injuries were gone and she could breathe freely. However, she still felt stiff and weak. Every step to the turbolift required an effort. When the lift came, she was glad it was empty. She let herself sag against the wall.

"Deck 17. My quarters."

After the lift had deposited her as close to her quarters as it possibly could, Sverak limped the last few steps to the door, slammed her fist against the panel to the right, and stumbled through as soon as the door would allow. The lights were off and the room was empty, so Ensign Quinn was probably on duty. Sverak simply collapsed on her bed, where she had barely the time to crawl under her covers before her eyes dropped shut and sleep overtook her.

* * *

Two Ensigns, one Human, one Bolian, were staring down on the sleeping Vulcan in Quinn's quarters.

"Her eyes are closed. Don't Vulcans sleep with their eyes open?"

"Actually, they do not." the Bolian said. "But don't they usually close only their nictitating membrane? This is maybe unusual." He took a step closer to get a better look. "Normally I would say she is in a light healing trance, but in that case she should be in Sickbay."

Ensign Quinn pursed her lips. "But she's not really Vulcan, right? Maybe she's supposed to be on duty and overslept. Maybe we can do her a favor and wake her up." She extended one finger and gave Sverak's shoulder an ungentle poke.

The result was impressive. Sveraks eyes flew open and she bolted upright almost at the same time, hands extended in claws and aimed unerringly at Enisgn Quinn's throat, who was choking before she knew what had hit her. Ensign Quinn opened her mouth to scream, but Sverak's eyes had already begun to close again and her fingers around Ensign Quinn's throat relaxed as she sagged back down onto the bed.

The Bolian Ensign freed his hand from where it had been resting on the base of Sverak's neck to perform the Vulcan nerve pinch. "Vulcans are also averse to being touched", he commented drily.

"What the fuck..." Ensign Quinn coughed, fingering her throat. "I'll report this and have her thrown out so fast she won't know what hit her, come on!" And with that, they left the cabin.

_Flames… flames and people's screams that were nearly drowned by the crackling of the fire… the smell of death in the air… the trembling of a planet underneath._

Sverak sat up in her bed. The dreams had left her shaken. She recalled having woken up apruptly, but the memory of what had happened then eluded her grasp. She thought for a moment, but her body reclaimed more rest, so she fell back, closed her eyes, and soon her mind resided in a place deeper than meditation could ever allow to let her body heal.

* * *

She awoke with a start, her whole upper body pressing upwards but held down on a soft surface. Her cheek stung, as if someone had slapped her. Fury rose inside of her but abated quickly when her eyes flew open to stare right into the face of Dr. Crusher. Abdominal muscles still straining to pull her into a sitting position she looked around and recognised Sickbay. She relaxed.

"Can you hear me?"

Sverak shot an irritated gaze at Dr. Crusher who stared at her with her eyebrows knit together. She was taut, and Sverak had to force herself to relax from a strain that was not hers. "Yessir."

Dr. Crusher's face relaxed. Her voice was softer when she replied "Good. I will now release the force field."

She tapped a few buttons, and when Sverak tried to sit up this time, she actually could. She had no recollection of having walked to Sickbay and she said so.

Dr. Crusher seemed to think about this for a moment. "When you did not come to Sickbay at 800 hours I activated your wristband and had you beamed here. I found that you had initiated a healing trance, and we let that run its course before waking you up again. You were in a trance for the last 16 hours."

Sverak frowned. "I am incapable of initiating a healing trance." And it was hardly probable that she would fall into such a trance without even knowing it.

Dr. Crusher sighed. "Very well. Sit down on that biobed please." Sverak complied, and Dr. Crusher produced a medical tricorder which she used to scan Sverak from head to toe. Sverak sat absolutely motionless. "You are cleared for light duty. Come back in a week for a complete physical. And please do explain something to me."

That sounded ominous. Sverak let her mental shields drop a tiny fraction and was hit with a full blast of disapproval. She flinched and hastily rebuilt her shields.

"Your records indicate that you are 18 years old, my scanner shows that you are 18 years old, yet the Vulcan age of majority is 25 and there are no authorization forms signed by anyone on file for you. Strictly speaking I might not even be allowed to treat you without your guardians' consent, yet here we are. Now I strongly presume that an oversight of this magnitude would have raised some flags along the way but it seemingly hasn't so why don't you tell me all about it?"

Sverak swallowed. "I was admitted to Starfleet Academy based on my Romulan citizenship. The Romulan age of majority is 16. As a consequence, I did not and still do not need anyone's consent."

Dr. Crusher briefly raised her eyes to the durasteel ceiling in what Sverak presumed was a Human gesture of exasperation. "There is a reason for the Vulcan age of majority to be 25. The Vulcan brain has to mature before certain mental techniques can be acquired. So I have to assume that among those there is the Healing Trance that you have not yet mastered. Is that correct?"

Sverak nodded, then ventured "I presumed that these techniques would not become relevant during my time in Starfleet."

"And that's not only completely wrong but also a good example why we do not usually let adolescents be the judge of these things." Dr. Crusher sighed. "Make an appointment with Lieutenant Selar and discuss this with her. I'll leave Starfleet Academy to sort out their side of this mess but you should master all of the Vulcan mental techniques, for our safety and for yours."

* * *

And that was not the only unpleasant conversation that Sverak had to endure that day. The other one involved Commander Riker and the quartermaster, with the only consolation that the consequences for Ensign Quinn were even more severe, with an official reprimand entered into her file. But it left Sverak with the task of suggesting a new roommate until the next gamma shift or have one assigned to her. There were few names to choose from. Ensigns Gonaqua and g'Hama from her shift were in a relationship that, in Sverak's private opinion, mainly consisted of reading astrophysics papers to each other. So Sverak's path took her once again to Ten Forward, where she sat down on a bar stool and asked Guinan for another glass of Venaada juice.

Guinan was a good listener, Sverak had to conclude, when she had told her the story of her latest misadventure almost despite herself. But Guinan also never seemed to judge, or if she did, Sverak was blissfully unaware of it. In this case, Guinan just smiled at her. "This one will sort itself out, I believe. Sito Jaxa will be here in a minute, you should talk to her."

Sverak's sense of self-preservation told her not to question that one, and indeed, Sito slipped into Ten Forward just seconds later. Guinan waved to her, gave Sverak another pointed look, then made herself scarce. As Sito was coming over, Sverak thought a bit on how to approach this possibly delicate subject, but in the end, was too tired from the events of the day to use Human embellishments for her tale. So she cut straight to the heart of the matter instead.

"I would like to phrase this as directly as possible. I find myself in need of a new roommate. While we do not know each other very well, I nonetheless think that we would probably not disturb each other very much." Sverak thought a bit about relevant information to add to this. "Also, I do not snore."

Sito's eyes seemed to pop out of her head and she laughed. "Well, I was not expecting that. Whatever prompts this new development?"

Sverak sighed. "My roommate carried out what I perceived to be an attack on me and I defended myself. Please note that the official reprimand will be in her file, not in mine. I do not condone violence towards roommates."

"Glad to hear that."

Sito paused. "Sverak, I'll be honest with you. You're right, I do not know you very well, even less than my current roommate, and you do not know me, either. I do know that there is at least one roommate you did not get along with, which is more than can be said about me. But I know what it feels like to be an outcast. For me it was an incident during what should have been my last year at Starfleet Academy. I know that after the the truth about that incident at the Academy had come to light I would have liked people to at least ask me about my version of it, but most didn't." Sito smiled. "So tell me your story and I'll tell you mine and we'll see whether we think that this would be a good fit."


	5. Past, part 1

Sverak folded her hands and collected her thoughts.

"I was born on DeghwI'Qagh III, a deserted class-M planet only a stone's throw away from the Romulan Neutral Zone. That planet, undoubtedly discovered accidentally by Klingons, could neither provide them with any significant natural resources, nor was it of any strategic meaning to them, being too small and unstable for a permanent base. So they left it to the archaeologists who started excavations when they found the remnants of an ancient civilisation on the southern hemisphere. Of what little is preserved of the team's notes, I know that this civilisation, put at a disadvantage by their feeble sun and the instability of their planet, thrived for only a hundred thousand years before it disappeared. Their evolution had proceeded very slowly, and they never got beyond rate D on the Richter and rate 3 on the Masters Scale. Most scientists were intrigued that they had made it even that far. It had been clear from the beginning that one could hardly hope to learn much of scientific interest from the excavations, only genuine archaeological interest could encourage a small group of scientists to settle on DeghwI'Qagh and found a colony. Most of them were Vulcans, just like my own parents, T'Lara and Silek. T'Lara was pregnant when they arrived, as I was told later on Vulcan, and soon thereafter she must have given birth to a girl that was me. It is very little I recall of my parents, just vague impressions I imagine remembering a time when my mother lifted me up and called me by my name, and the feeling of love I would sense in her and the joy I felt, but it is possible that my memory deceives me and that there was no such thing.

"The facts are that only a few months later, DeghwI'Qagh's moon, long ago worn down by seismic and volcanic activities, broke into pieces. Some fragments hit the planet, one destroyed the colony. That incident cost most of the team their lives, others were killed during volcanic eruptions or floods when the rotation of the planet became increasingly unstable. Again, I was too little then to remember this incident clearly now but some memories of it were lodged in my subconsciousness and would haunt my dreams for years to come.

"It appears that a group of about twelve Vulcan children aged a few months to 13 years were spared and shortly thereafter rescued by the cloaked Romulan Bird of Prey Hnoiyika, set out to investigate Federation activities beyond the Neutral Zone, illegally, of course. It has never been revealed to me why the Commander of the vessel did not choose to abandon those children that presented no apparent value to the Empire. My Romulan father has never raised the topic, and I have never asked. In any case, when the Federation Starship USS Stargazer came to respond to the colonist's emergency call, all they found were the bare, devastated remnants of a planet circling the sun. There were no other survivors.

"We were brought to a nameless desert world that bore much resemblance to a prison colony and housed individuals who had become inconvenient to the Tal Shiar for various reasons but who were too important to be killed at once. Still, a dispatch to that colony meant certain death. That alone showed that, despite the fact that we had indeed been saved by Romulans, we were supposed to die."

"Where do you know all of this from?"

"From my Romulan parents, from relatives of my biological parents on Vulcan and from Starfleet reports.

"I grew up on that planet until I was three years old. We all kept together in one goup, mostly for protection. The older Vulcan children tried to teach the younger ones the basics of the mind rules and the Vulcan way of thinking, but most of the time we were struggling for survival, and it was absolutely imperative to learn how to fight. The first thing of my childhood I can remember clearly is being given a knife and being told how to hold it.

"Soon afterwards, a commission of Romulans came to the colony, and I can remember them paying us a visit as well. One of them demanded to talk to our leader, and they stood there, facing each other: the tall, intimidating Romulan commander and Sorok, the oldest boy of our group, who did not show fear, neither under the harsh words of the Romulan commander, nor when the Romulan drew his disruptor and shot Sorok down.

"I don't know why I did it, but I was so full of anger and hate that I ran to the Romulan who bent down to confirm Sorok's death and stabbed the Romulan with my dagger, aiming for the heart just like I had been told. The wound was not very deep as I did not have much force, so the Romulan commander rose and kicked me away. When he aimed his disruptor at me to kill me as well, I was able to get up and flee. The disruptor beam injured me, but it did not kill me, and I ran to one of the many hideouts we had discovered in the area to escape the Romulans.

"Eventually, they found me, but instead of being executed I was adopted by Commander Harradeth and Sub-Commander Telar of the Romulan fleet…"

_They had effortlessly carried her over to a tall Romulan who Sverak recognized as a member of the Romulan party, even in her semi-conscious state. He had bent down to her and examined her thoroughly, yet carefully. He had lifted her head for her eyes to meet his, and when she had made a last effort to stare defiantly, even though she feared him, he had smiled not unkindly and ordered her captor to carry her away._

_A gruff doctor had seen to her wounds and had treated her. Sverak despised being touched, as she had not yet learned how to block out such unwanted contacts with other people's minds, but she contended herself with snarling angrily and escaping at first possibility. From that time on, she did not fear him or the other Romulans any more._

_At first, she had gobbled down her food the very moment she got it, casting furtive glances to the left and to the right. It took her days to realize that in this place, she did not have to fight for food, nor would there ever be a shortage of it._

"So that's how I became part of Commander Harradeth's family. As far as I was concerned, he was the only father I had ever had, and Sub-Commander Telar my only mother. My Romulan sister Kalesa was only a year older than me, and our parents took great care never to show any bias towards either one of us. As far as they were concerned, I was like a biological child to them and Romulus was my home."

Sverak did not have to make a conscious effort to conjure up mental images of the planet she still thought of as home, they pressed themselves upon her. Romulus, cradle of the Romulan People, home of the government, heart of the Romulan Empire of Stars. Romulus was an arid planet, not unlike Vulcan, but whereas Vulcan always seemed like a giant sandpit, Romulus was simply beautiful. A deadly beauty, but beauty nonetheless. There was the Valley of Chula with its rugged stone formations, pointing like black fingers into the sky, or the Firefalls of Gath'thong, where volcanoes spit out molten lava that slowly rolled into the sea.

Sito had listened to Sverak with growing incredulity showing on her face. "I don't quite understand you, Sverak. The Romulans have kept your and your Vulcan friends in complete desolation on some godforsaken planet for almost two years, not cared the slightest bit about your well-being, even butchered some of your group - and you simply accepted a Romulan as your father? Weren't you worried about what had happened to the other Vulcan children?"

Sverak pondered for a while, formulating her answer very carefully. "As I have already told you, our foremost concern was our survival. We, the Vulcan children, banded together in a group and stood up for each other because our chances for fighting off the other prisoners were in numbers. Apart from that, there was little love lost between us. The older Vulcans tried to teach the younger ones the mind rules because they regarded it as their duty, not because they particularly cared about us. And we, the younger ones, did not even feel any moral obligation towards each other, we just cared about being protected from the other prisoners, getting enough to eat and staying warm enough at night. The only well-defined enemies we had were the other prisoners. The Romulans kept away from the planet, and even though I was told that they were the ones responsible for our predicament, I certainly bore no grudge against them because I was more concerned with fighting for food. So when Commander Harradeth offered me a sheltered life with food and love, it never even occurred to me to refuse this offer. Of course I was suspicious at first, but only because I had never learned to trust anyone. My Romulan parents gave me no reason whatsoever to be mistrustful of their intentions, and soon enough I felt as if I had always been part of their family. As to the other Vulcans - I did inquire about their fate. Each of them was offered a choice. They could either remain on the prison colony for the rest of their life or renounce their Vulcan heritage and find a place with a Romulan family."

Sito eyed her with a strange expression on her face. Sverak felt a strange jumble of emotions emanating from her. "Have you ever asked what choices they made? What became of them?" Sito asked.

Sverak shook her head. "No. This would never have occurred to me in the Romulan Empire, and when I was on Vulcan I would rather have bitten my tongue off than acknowledge anything Vulcan about my past."

"You could try to get the information from Starfleet databases."

"I do not even know if I have the clearance to do so. Even more importantly, what would be the purpose?"

Sito seemed surprised at this. "Aren't you the least bit curious? Maybe you could get together and compare notes, I don't know."

Sverak thought about this for a moment. "There is not much I can remember about them. They would not find solace in hearing about my experiences, and I would not find solace in hearing about theirs."

Sito shrugged. "I'm not so sure about that. But I get your point, I mean, you were a toddler and a child throughout all of this. But what about now? How do you think about your childhood on Romulus, your foster parents and the Romulan values of your upbringing now?" Sito moved forward, looking at her intently. "My planet spent 40 years under the rule of a species that took what they wanted simply because they could. What do you think about this?"

Sverak nodded. "I do understand what you are asking. I do know that Romulans are an aggressive species that hold their territories through subjugation. Do I condone this approach? Definitely not. A species that thinks itself superior, which one has to do in order to justify conquest and subjugation, is wrong, not only morally but also factually. No species is truly superior if the Borg have managed to assimilate them all so far."

Sito's eyes were wide. "I'm not sure that I've ever heard this line of reasoning, but okay. But then why did you sign up for Starfleet as a Romulan if not to make a statement?"

Sverak managed to look both stoic and sheepish at the same time. "It was the only way for me to get in. I was underage for a Vulcan, I still am, and my foster parents would never have let me go. So I had to apply based on my Romulan citizenship, which has never been revoked, they simply do not do that, ever."

Sito groaned and let her head fall into her hands. Then she raised her head again. "What is life but a string of bad choices. I'll tell you about mine in a minute. For the record, I think that you would probably have had an easier time if you had gone as a Vulcan but I'll be interested in hearing why you felt that you could not."

Sverak sighed. "I would mislead you if I were to let you think that that was my only motivation although it was a compelling one. Knowing what I do now I would not be able to be a very good Romulan, I believe. They are a deeply xenophobic and violent race and this I cannot understand, or at least not any more. But I have been welcomed into a Romulan family, while few Vulcans made me feel at home on their planet. This also has to count for something."

Sito smiled, ruefully. "Life would be easier if it was black or white, but it usually is not. Let me tell you how I grew up. I was born on Bajor to parents that had already spent most of their lives under Cardassian rule. Noone on Bajor was unaffected by Cardassians, not my grandparents, who had been killed during the invasion, not my parents, not me. I saw things that I will not talk about with anyone. My parents were eking out a living in a remote village in the countryside, and we kept our heads low. Others have tales to tell of brave resistance, my parents do not. But they did something else. They built a lightship and escaped with me when I was six years old. Those ships were too small and insignificant to appear on Cardassian sensors, and my parents were lucky enough to be picked up by a commercial freighter outside of the Bajoran system before our resources ran out.

"I do not remember much of our voyage, but I do know that my parents told me that we were playing a game, and the goal was to explore space. I was so fascinated with everything, I know that I've never felt afraid in space. And that feeling stuck with me, this is the reason why I am here, in Starfleet.

"We were dropped off in one of the Bajoran refugee camps in a neighboring system, and for a while I would whine at my parents to go back because... well... it was a camp. We did have enough to eat, but our living conditions were extremely poor. Fortunately, after a few years, my parents managed to get a lease on a farm, and they were able to make a living for themselves, not rely on Federation charity. And they not only made sure that I had plenty of Bajoran friends, so that I did not feel like an outcast most of the time, they also made sure that I obtained and learned to value a good education. They were so proud when I got accepted into Starfleet."

Sito smiled wistfully.

"The Cardassians only left Bajor last year and my parents still have not made a final decision but I think that they won't go back. They would have to start from the beginning again. I do not even remember Bajor all that well but I think I would love to go back at some point and make it my homeworld again. Right now, space is my home, and I'm perfectly fine with that."


	6. Past, part 2

Sverak smiled faintly. "Yeah, it somehow defaults to that, right? I had to leave Romulus when I was ten. Everything happened so fast that I did not even have time to pack, I also did not have time to say good-bye to my father, who was not present when a Romulan centurion came to our home, told my mother and my sister that he had orders to take me with him, and had me beamed up to a warship that took me straight to the Neutral Zone, no detours. It appears that this... release was part of trade negotiations with the Federation that had started again, but it left me with Soral, a distant cousin of my biological father, and his wife T'Lana. What they got was a child, who was Vulcan in the shape of the ears only, who had not started doing any mind exercises and who believed in expressing... strong... emotions. What I got was a family that did not seem to love or even appreciate me in any way, schoolmates that were unintentionally and intentionally cruel, and a way of living imposed onto me that was alien.

"I finally resorted to extensive physical exercise up to total exhaustion to let off some steam. Every evening I spent hours in the gym, training in about everything, preferably martial arts. That alone was enough to displease Soral and T'Lana who very probably never understood my true motives and thought that it was some manifestation of my love of violence instead of the only acceptable outlet for my emotions that was left to me. I must confess that I never bothered to explain it to them. Once they suggested that I should cut back on sports and spend some more time on my mind exercises instead. However, I made it quite clear to them that this was absolutely out of the question. Not always with the nicest choice of words..." Sverak smiled ruefully and went on. "Our whole relationship was based on misunderstandings - none of which either side tried to clear up. I did not feel at home on Vulcan, it was more alien to me than any of the worlds I had been to."

And, interestingly, the other Vulcan children had not been a problem. Or at least not after the first few altercations, which Sverak, despite her smaller size, won by a large margin. Sverak, true to her Romulan upbringing, fought with a singular determination to win and had been taught well. She possessed a ruthlessness that Vulcan children lacked. She was mostly left alone after those fights, which suited her just fine.

"I spent almost a year like this until an event occured that in itself was not so important but that made me more receptive to everything else Vulcan had to offer."

_Sverak doggedly trodded through the Vulcan desert, which was bathed in T'Kashi's inexorably burning rays. The hot air was flimmering above the ground, no animal dared to come out of hiding in the boiling heat of noon. Sverak was imperturbed by it and stomped through the sand, her eyes fixed on her destination: the mountain ridge of Gol. One particular mountain, to be exact._

_It had been some time ago when she - being on a school trip - had first spotted the mountain that had virtually cried out for her to scale it. When she had come home from school today, frustrated and exhausted from her struggle with her classmates who had left out no occasion for bullying and hurting her, she had slammed her data-cartridge onto the table and keyed one short message into it: "I'm out rock-climbing. Will probably be back for supper." A slow smile played around Sverak's lips as she imagined Soral's and T'Lana's reactions to the message - too bad that she wouldn't be there to see it._

_She had taken the spare hovercraft and driven out of the city towards the desert. When there was no more living soul to be seen, no more buildings or any signs of civilization, Sverak had stopped the hovercraft and set out towards her goal._

_The mountains that had seemed so small in the distance grew bigger and bigger as Sverak came closer. Soon, rocks covered her path, rocks that became bigger and bigger so that Sverak had to step around them, and the straight track of her footprints became a crooked line as she navigated her way to the foot of the mountain that seemed to have been pushed straight out of the desert floor by some unimaginable force. It did not level out into the desert, it simply consisted of one wall rising up at right angles from the sand. Erosion had taken its toll on the gray rock, at least on the lower part of the wall: huge boulders had broken out and now stuck in the sand where sand storms had smoothed the edges. Sverak flung back her hood and let her gaze wander towards the top of the mountain. She spotted less and less cracks and ledges in the rock above. Which was just as well, she mused, it would make the whole enterprise a lot more entertaining._

_Sverak unstrapped her backpack, opened it and rummaged inside. She produced a bottle of water from which she drank slowly. She briefly considered taking the backpack with her, but it would only slow her down. From one of its pockets, she took a role of thin thread: her rope for the descent. She fastened a bag of talcum to her belt - old-fashioned but nevertheless adequate for her purpose and the only thing she had been able to coax out of the replicator in so short a time._

_In the beginning, it was easy. Sverak had ample opportunity for placing her hands and feet, and she climbed methodically and purposefully. Left foot into a crack. Left hand onto the ledge. Right foot. Right hand. Sverak completely lost track of time. Her mind was so absorbed with the task at hands that she did not have the time to think about anything else. She focused all her attention on the mountain. __40 Eridani made her way across Vulcan's red sky. Higher up, the ascent became increasingly difficult. Sverak's progress slowed down since she had to spend more time on looking four sound purchase._

_Suddenly, the ledge under her left foot crumbled, a small avalanche of rocks was dislodged, and the stones fell down the sheer wall. It sounded strange. For the last few hours, the only sounds she had heard were the wind and her breathing. Her left foot dangling in the air, Sverak inhaled deeply. Then she started probing the wall with her left foot, tightening her fingers still clinging to the rock. When she had found a small crack she could force her foot into, she halted for the first time and looked down where the falling rocks had buried themselves in the sand. Far, far down. Sverak looked up again. She probably would not be able to make it in time for supper, then._

_Sverak shrugged to herself and continued, probing each ledge or crack with all the more care. __The shadows grew longer and longer as 40 Eridani approached the horizon. The harsh and blinding light became soft and gentle and enshrouded the whole landscape in a golden veil. Sverak paused to take in the view. A gentle breeze caressed her face and carried the metallic cry of a Le-Matya hunting for prey over to her. The stark beauty of Vulcan was spread out in all its magnificence for Sverak to see. She felt a strange sensation of peace invade her, and she smiled. A glittering in the purple sky caught her attention, and she turned ever so slightly to get a better look._

_Wind-riders, coasting in the air over Vulcan's desert, living in the air, mating in the air, dying in the air. She had heard of them but never seen any of them before. Their bodies were so fragile that they would perish on the ground. The translucent creatures were hardly visible to the naked eye, and only the peculiar shade of evening light allowed Sverak to see one now._

_Tearing her gaze away from the creature, Sverak contemplated once again the rock above her. She was cutting it close. Soon enough, the light would be too feeble for her to climb safely. When she noticed that her hand became slippery with sweat, she felt herself starting to panic. So she willed herself to calm down, she took deep breaths, and soon enough, she could continue. She managed the last meters through sheer force of will, focussing entirely on placing her hands and feet into the shallow cracks. Finally, she reached the top and pulled herself over the ledge with what she strongly suspected to be her last strength. She all but fell down onto the warm rock._

_Sverak felt exaustion and relief wash over her, and she made no effort to stem the flow. Instead, she rolled over on her back, to look at the stars above her. She sighed contentedly, her eyes wandering from one constellation to the next. The stone beneath her warmed her and protected her from the chill of the night in the desert. _

_Sverak was wholly unprepared for suddenly seeing a Vulcan face, shrouded in the hood of a white robe and crisscrossed with wrinkles, looming over hers. _

"And that's how I met T'Khol, who regularly meditated - and still does - in the desert, saw my hovercraft and decided to investigate. She brought me straight back to Soral and T'Lana. But that was actually a good thing because she not only smoothed the considerable ripples that my departure had caused, she also proceeded from then on to give me regular lessons in the mind exercises. Her reasoning was that knowledge was always preferable to not knowing, everything could be useful at some point, and that, to me, made a lot of sense, so I actually started making an effort. That helped with Soral and T'Lana, but when I was fifteen they still felt that I had made insufficient progress in mastering my emotions. When I found out that they were seriously considering sending me away to the Kohlinaru monastery of Gol to purge my emotions once and for all I applied for admission to Starfleet Academy."

Sverak felt a jumble of emotions emanate from Sito, and most of it was anger. On her behalf, Sverak realized.

"Sverak, your Vulcan foster parents sound awful."

"Maybe so, but the Vulcan way of mastering one's emotions is the only thing that the whole of Vulcan society is completely intolerant about. Not following the tenets of Surak is not an option, for most Vulcans that would be the straight path to pre-reformation levels of violence and destruction. I've become reasonably good at the mind exercises but I do express emotions occasionally, I'm simply not ruled by them. Well, most of the time. I do not even know if, after thousands of years of controlling them, Vulcans are even capable of having feelings with pre-reformation intensity. But Soral and T'Lana felt that this was still too dangerous to be allowed to continue."

Sito shook her head, then smiled. "So you applying as a Romulan is, in a sense, truthful."

Sverak pondered this thought. "Probably not any more, so you're right about the only home being space."

Sito looked at her ruefully. "This is what I am sometimes afraid of, that Bajor will never feel like home, either, and then who am I really? We've all mingled with many species and seen so many wonderful things, and yet the accident of which planet we were born on still defines us on such a deep level. I never asked to be born on a planet that was invaded by an aggressive alien species, and when I was a refugee there were countless people who judged me for that fact alone. When I left for Starfleet Academy, it was a relief. There were so many species in the Academy that I actually managed to fit in quite well."

Sverak stared at her glass. "For me, it was more a matter of getting out of the frying pan and heading straight into the fire."


	7. Past, part 3

Sito laughed out loud, then sobered. "What did you expect? If the Vulcans barely tolerated you, and they are supposed to keep their emotions in check, then Humans could only be worse."

"I did not expect anything. My time at Starfleet Academy was the first time I was largely among Humans. I had never been to Earth, I only got to see a few holo-vids of it. I had encountered Humans before, just as I had encountered Klingons, Andorians, Dopterians and various other races. On a freighter I was on, one member of the crew had been Human. But he scarcely socialized with the others, always staying in his quarters and locking himself in. He must have been strange for a Human, but I did not realize it them. I was under the impression that finding a place in Starfleet would not have anything to do with how I get along with Humans.

"When I got the message that I was accepted into Starfleet I had one final, unpleasant conversation with Soral and T'Lana and left Vulcan on the same day. I was lucky to catch a freighter to the closest liberty port on Rigel VII. There, another freighter offered me passage to Earth in exchange for my help on the ship. I had eight weeks to bridge up to the start of the Academy and I spent it on that ship right until we got to Starbase One."

_Sverak rushed through the corridors of Starbase One, pushing through crowds, dodging most of the people and murmuring excuses all along the way when she could not avoid bumping into them. The huge duffel bag she was carrying with her did not make things easier. Sverak slowed down briefly to catch a glimpse at the colour codes. Next junction... turn right... a couple of metres down the corridor, and... there it was. Shuttlebay 21. She came to a skidding halt and waited for the huge doors to glide open, hopping from one foot onto the other. Come on, faster, you're just about to miss your lift to the Academy, and as they say, the first impression is the one that lasts. It certainly wouldn't do to be too late before it had started._

_Sverak impatiently corkscrewed her way through the gap between the communicating doors once it was big enough for her. She took in her surroundings with one single gaze. Rows of shuttles parked on either side of the bay. She looked around briefly, and her face lit up when she had found what she had been looking for. One shuttle was already waiting on the launching pad, ready for departure. In the wild hope that this was her shuttle, Sverak made a dash for it, past the Flight Deck Officer, who stared at her in bewilderment. To her immense relief, the doors of the shuttlecraft opened once she had reached the sleek aircraft, and a Starfleet officer - a lieutenant, according to his rank pips - appeared in the opening. He did a double-take when he got sight of her, and Sverak flinched inwardly, when it dawned on her. She had to be quite a sight, with her tousled hair, her dirt-stained face and her bedraggled clothes. She cut in before the lieutenant could say anything. __"Sverak sir. I believe I was scheduled for this flight. I apologize both for the delay and my outward appearance. The freighter that has taken me to the spacedock had some preblems with its power couplings, and I was asked to participate in fixing them."_

_The true story was slightly longer, but Sverak felt that the details could only be detrimental to her budding career. The lieutenant's bleak expression showed that he did not quite know what to make of her tale. In any case, he finally murmured a "Very well. Hop in", stepped aside and made way for Sverak to climb inside, past the lieutenant into the passenger compartment. __Sverak walked down the aisle to the very last row of seats, which was empty. With a small sigh, she let herself sink into the soft cushions, dropping her sack onto the seat beside her._

_The shuttle took off a few minutes later, swung around slowly and waited for the huge bay doors to open. They passed through the forcefield into space, heading for a blue ball just a few hundred thousand kilometres away. Soon enough, they were close enough for Sverak to see Earth, partly enshrouded in clouds, from the porthole next to her. The crescent became bigger and bigger, then the darkness of space was no longer visible as they descended through the atmosphere._

_The huge continent below had the shape of a comma in Standard. Sverak recognized it as South-America. So much water on the planet! Hardly any deserts. Not like Vulcan at all. __Soon she could discern the large city areas on the continent, and one of them grew bigger and bigger as the shuttle headed towards it. San Francisco. Starfleet Academy. __The town's buildings pointed like fingers into the sky. Huge domes, spindly spires and some large, spacious strucures formed a bizarre skyline. Buildings on worlds of the Romulan Empire were low, close to the earth. The style on Vulcan was not much different. On this planet, it seemed as if humanity reached out for the stars even in their architecture._

_They approached the Academy. Sverak gave an inaudible sigh when the shuttle landed smoothly on the platform. That had been her last spaceflight for quite some time. For the next year at least, she would remain on the ground._

_Sverak was the last to step out of the shuttlecraft, and for a moment she squinted when the gleaming rays of Sol met her unprotected eyes. Then her extra eyelid closed and filtered out the intense light. Her surroundings dimmed, and Sverak saw that the other cadets had already assembled in a group around a Starfleet Lieutenant Commander. She shouldered her bag and joined them, pivoting on her heels in walking so that she could take another quick look at the Academy grounds. Her new home._

_"Welcome to Starfleet Academy", the Lieutenant Commander was saying. He smiled. "I won't say much presently, because I'm sure you can find your way around and there will be an official greeting ceremony in a few days when all new cadets have arrived." He held up the stack of data PADDs he was carrying._

_"There's one of those for each of you. You will find your room on it, a map of the Academy grounds and a time table as well as some useful information about the Academy in general. You will keep this PADD for the duration of your stay at the Academy. No personal PADDs are allowed." He smiled again._

_"Don't even think of rigging up some fancy tricks with those. We've had all sorts of inventive attempts to cheat, and so far we've thwarted each and every one of them."_

_The officer glanced at the first PADD and read the name. "Mikaal Sotol." He looked up questioningly and then handed the PADD to the Andorian who had stepped forward. "Sverak." She made her way through the group and took the PADD. "Nikita Romaleva..."_

_Sverak touched the PADD, and its small screen flickered to life, yielding a list of the contents of its memory. Quickly, she punched up the location of her room. Number 22, west wing of building CP3. She would share it with a human called Anita Martinez. __Sverak turned her attention back to the Lieutenant Commander, who had just finished distributing the PADDs. He clasped his hands together. "Make yourself comfortable, enjoy the few days left... Feel free to explore San Francisco. For the moment, you can come and go whenever you want, although we encourage you to spend at least the night in the Academy."_

_This drew some laughter from her comrades, which puzzled Sverak a bit. "If you have any questions, ask them now or see me any time you like. I'll be happy to answer them." He gazed around, but nobody raised a hand. __"Well... In this case, have a good time." He turned and left, leaving the small group standing at the shuttle._

"My roommate did not arrive until the evening before the term started. I did not spend much time in my room either. I would have liked to get to know the planet a little bit better. Earth is widely known for its varied climate zones and ecosystems. But I did not have enough credits to travel very far, so I was limited to the area around San Francisco," Sverak said.

"What was your first impression of the Academy?" Sito asked.

"I was a bit disappointed, really. To me, the building seemed old-fashioned, not the least bit the state-of-the-art high tech training center I had expected. I was used to simple living standards. Vulcans seem to make an art of it. But I did not expect door-handles and spartan living quarters sparsely furnished with hardly more than a bed and a desk. I thought technology would be much more visible on Earth."

Sito laughed. "Yeah, I had more or less the same thoughts. In the camps, low living standards were caused by poverty. At Starfleet Academy, I had some serious doubts about the state of the fleet at first. At least until I got to see the training rooms. They're state of the art. What did you think about Humans?"

Sverak thought about this for a moment. "They laugh a lot. They're inconsistent."

_The Romulans kept their emotions close to the surface. They would not always act on them, they could control them, but an undercurrent of what they felt was always in their voice, in their behavior. With humans, it was different. Sverak sensed Commander Taggart's hatred in the class "Introduction to Warp Physics" that he taught, but his demeanour towards her never suggested that he despised her for what she was. Sverak found it difficult to react to this. She did not want to participate in what she perceived to be a lie, but she could not adopt a more defiant attitude either and give Taggart a reason to show his hatred in public. It left her puzzled. At that point__ more than ever, Sverak was glad that T'Khol_ _had taught her so well, and she spent many hours a day meditating to keep her emotions contained._

"But how about you, Sito, did you have an overall positive experience at Starfleet Academy?"

"Yes and no, but the latter was largely my fault and an example of the bad choices I was talking about.

"I told you that my parents were extremely proud of the fact that I had been accepted. From the beginning I studied as hard as I could. I took everything seriously, I was aware of the opportunity I had been given and was determined to make the best of it. For me, being at Starfleet was a priviledge and so much more than I could ever have dreamt of. I was a bit of an exotic cadet, but noone ridiculed me for my Bajoran heritage, most cadets were curious. What I really wanted to do was flying, so I spend a ridiculous number of hours in simulators and when I was selected for Nova Squadron I could not have been happier."


	8. Past, part 4

"We were four Humans and me, the Bajoran. Our leader, Nicholas Locarno, was charismatic and, most of all ambitious... well, we all were. The membership in the Nova Squadron put an insane training schedule on top of my class schedule, but at first, we were doing extremely well. After one year of flying as a team we managed to win the Rigel Cup. We felt invincible.

"Our second year as a team was to be our last, three of us were set to graduate, Nick and myself among them. We were selected to perform during the graduation ceremony, and we wanted to show something truly spectacular. So we had the idea to execute the Kolvoord Starburst maneuver. Do you know what that is?"

Sverak ventured "Yes, I do, I was member of a flying squad as well, though of considerably less repute. The maneuver is prohibited for Starfleet Academy squads."

Sito was astonished. "You were part of a squad? That's most unusual for a first year cadet. Yes, the maneuver was banned because of an that accident that had cost five cadets performing their lives. But we thought we could do everything, so why not also a maneuver that had been banned for a hundred years. People had died trying to perform it, but we felt we were so much better." She sounded bitter to Sverak's ears. "Or at least four of us thought we were. One of us, Joshua Albert, was not ready to do it and he had told as much to at least one team member, Wesley Crusher. And the horrible, horrible truth was that he was right. But he did not feel that he could stand up to the rest of us and especially to Nick. The Kolvoord Starburst maneuver requires extremely precise flying. During a training flight on the Academy Flight Range, when we were just about to perform the maneuver, Josh crashed into Jean Hajar and we collided. Four of us were transported out in time, Josh did not make it.

"Nick was a charismatic leader, he was extremely persuasive and it was he who first suggested to cover up what we had done. We had filed a Yeager loop in the flight plan and that was what we would state to the official board of inquiry investigating the accident. Even if that meant throwing Josh under the bus because it would imply that he botched a maneuver that was not overly complicated.

"It would be so easy to say that Nick had convinced me to lie, but that would only be part of the truth. It is true that we had spend so much time together in training that at first, I did not even think about doubting Nick's decisions. But even when I thought about whether what we had done and continued doing was right, I could not bring myself to do anything to jeopardize the team or Nick. For me, being in an elite flying squad was an honor that was worth... well... everything. I would have died rather than reveal the truth.

"But Wesley came clean in the end. Not entirely voluntarily. Captain Picard, who had been present at the board of inquiry, had correctly guessed what we had really attempted to do. In the end, Nick took the blame on himself and was expelled, and we had a reprimand on our record in addition to other consequences that we had to face.

"When the dust of that had settled, as I was sitting in my room, I realized that I had never felt so ashamed before in my life. Upholding Starfleet values had meant exactly nothing to me in the aftermath of the accident. I had always thought of myself as fundamentally a good person fighting for just causes, but I wasn't, I was just as capable of being deceitful and dishonorable as everyone else. As the Cardassians. And that was an ugly truth to face. I thought about dropping out there and then, but that would have been a coward's thing to do. The one thing I can do is to do better in the future, which means that here and now I'm less interested in what you call yourself now, Vulcan or Romulan, than in who you really are, what kind of person.

Sverak looked at Sito. "I am not so sure it would have been a cowardly thing to drop out of the Academy but it is a brave thing to have stayed and face the consequences."

Sito smiled. "Thanks. But how did you get into a flight squad?"

Sverak, realizing that this was an attempt to change the subject, replied "The team leader, Noah Said, got me into it. They lacked a fifth pilot because noone wanted to fly with them. They had called themselves 'Chaos Curse', a telling name, really. They had the worst reputation of all squads, and every bit of it was true.

"Noah's problem was that he seemed to be a fairly good pilot when it came to simulator exercises. That's how he came to be the leader of a squad in the first place. As soon as he got into a real shuttle, however, he regularly botched it up and became a security risk for the rest of the squad. Noah was simply so afraid of doing something wrong and thereby causing harm to someone else or himself that he could think of nothing else and made the very mistakes he sought to avoid. Now, Noah had opted for science, so there was a good chance he would never have to fly a shuttle in his whole career anyway, but nevertheless he wanted to overcome that fear. So he chose to practice in the hope that eventually, he would get used to flying and forget his anxieties."

Sverak remembered the mixture of fear, self-loathing and determination she had felt in the back of her mind every time they had lifted off the ground. Outwardly, Noah had always been brave. Inwardly, he harbored a battlefield.

"Anyway, when I started training with them we spent half of the time just trying to avoid each other without inflicting too much damage on the ships. I didn't know how the others got their flight permits, but bribery must have been involved somewhere."

Sito interrupted her. "Hold on a moment. I didn't even see you perform at the graduation ceremony. Hadn't there been some kind of accident shortly before?"

_Sverak laughed as she forced her small spacecraft into a loop. The crescent of Titan first appeared at the bottom of her viewscreen, then filled the whole cockpit with a warm light._

_"That was definitely not a Yeager loop, that was a Noah loop. Impressive, but not good enough for the graduation ceremonies! „There was laughter in Kerrin's voice coming from the loudspeakers. The Bolian together with Sverak, the Humans Noah Shah and Kim Shapiro as well as the Tellarite Taksa formed the flying squad. If they had not given themselves the name 'Chaos Curse', others would have done it in their place._

_The others joined in his laughter. As Sverak completed her loop, the voice of their squad leaders, at whom the comment had been directed, erupted from her speakers, chuckling good-naturedly. Noah knew his limits, after all, and fortunately, he did not mind a laugh or two at his expense._

_"Well, I think we've managed enough violations of our flight plan for today. We should give it a break for now. Let's go back."_

_Sverak saw her four teammates line up their crafts and aim their noses at one particularly bright speck of light in the star-studded darkness of space. Sverak's fingers danced over her control board almost on their own accord. Her shuttle spun around its z-axis for her to get one last good look at Titan and Saturn nearby. Then she accelerated to join her team as the last shuttlecraft in the row._

_She fed the coordinates of Earth into the computer, switched to autopilot and finally leaned back to enjoy the rest of the flight. Sverak welcomed every flight training as a much-needed deviation from her schedule. She had indeed been lucky to have been granted flight privileges in her first academy year. Even if she did not fly with the most gifted of pilots, at least she was having fun. That did not change the fact, however, that if they really wanted to fly at the graduation ceremony, they would either have to radically change their program or work a lot harder to achieve the goal they had set up for themselves._

_Sverak was about to reach out to activate ship-to-ship communication and ask her team leader what he thought of today's performance, when suddenly her small spacecraft was rocked violently and veered off course. Sverak reacted almost instantaneously. Her fist slammed down on the switch to activate manual control, with her other hand she steered her spacecraft back on course while her eyes remained fixed on the computer screen to scan for information about what had just happened._

_"Flight leader to Cadet Sverak. Why did you deviate from course? Repeat: why did you deviate from course?"_

_Noah's voice sounded urgent. Sverak wished she had an answer to his question. So far, the computer screens reporting on the status of her spacecraft's machinery showed nothing wrong with it. Sverak toggled the communication switch with one finger, leaving both hands close to the controls just in case._

_"Cadet Sverak to flight leader. The deviation was caused by the autopilot. Everything checks out normal now. The computer has noticed nothing out of the ordinary. Please stand by while I'm performing a level four diagnostic on all systems."_

_Her fingers keyed in the appropriate sequence, and the computer set to work._

_Ten minutes later, Sverak still wasn't any step closer to finding out what had just happened. The data displayed on the monitor only revealed regular behaviour of all internal systems._

_She reopened her com link. "All systems are checking out normal. I suggest ignoring the incident for the moment and filing a report for the maintenance crew on arrival."_

_The answer was crisp and clear. "Very well. We will proceed to Earth. Flight leader out."_

_Once again, Sverak left her ship in the care of the automatic steering system, but now she lacked the peace of mind to fully enjoy the return flight._

"Maybe you should have declared an emergency instead and evacuated to the station at Mimas."

"To abandon ship because of a computer glitch?" Sverak shook her head. "It was completely within regulations to proceed to Earth. A board of review cleared Noah at once."

Sito shuddered visibly. Sverak felt a mixture of remorse and pain emanating from the Bajoran.

"So we went all the way to Earth and were cleared for descent to the Academy flying range. Approximately ten kilometers above the ground, my impulse drive, my antigrav system and my internal dampers shut down for good."

_For a moment, there was complete silence, then Sverak felt the sensation of free fall. Her descent angle had been very steep, and now her craft dropped like a stone straight to the ground. After a few milliseconds of complete surprise, Sverak fought the urge to scream in anger, focusing her eyes on the computer screen instead._

_Did she still have thrusters? Thank whatever deity there was, she had thrusters! But not for long, as a quick calculation made her realize._

_"Sverak, what's wrong? What are you doing?"_

_"Aerial surveillance to shuttlecraft Orinoco: Slow your descent. I repeat: slow your descent."_

_Urgent voices filled her cockpit. Sverak concentrated on the controls. Firing her thrusters, she slowed down the descent a bit and guided her spacecraft into a flat angle of descent. Although her spacecraft did not have wings that deserved the name, it would be able to coast on air as soon as the atmosphere got more dense. Then she cut thrusters to save valuable fuel. Finally, she opened a channel to the Academy flying range flight control._

_"Flight control, this is shuttlecraft Orinoco. I have lost impulse drive, antigrav system and inertial dampers. Transmitting flight data now. I await instructions."_

_Her options were limited. She did not have much time until her craft hit the ground. Ample time to initiate an emergency beam-out, but hardly enough to take care of the spacecraft. __That was when communications shut down as well. This time, Sverak let go a howl of frustration. __Then, she let the computer plot a course for the Mongolian desert, one of the most desolate areas that Earth still had to offer. __Since she could not even trust the computer any more, she banished all other thoughts from her mind and concentrated on checking the calculations in her head, instead._

_The atmosphere had become thicker, the ship had slowed down its descent considerably, its studded wings giving rudimentary lift. The outer hull sensors registered temperatures of several hundred degrees Celsius. The duranium alloy creaked and sang but it held. One more thing to do. __Sverak braced herself, slammed her whole palm onto the controls and watched, as all thrusters fired and burned her last fuel to decelerate the small ship at an incredible rate. Sverak was pressed against her restraining belts and felt the force of several g's pulling at her, tearing at her body. The ship did not react kindly to this kind of treatment. The hull screamed and whined, as the stressed metal threatened to break. The whole ship rocked and shuddered, inclining itself to one side and the other, always dangerously close to the point of nosing over._

_Sverak gritted her teeth, her hands clamped around her armrests. Come on, come on, comeon, comeoncomeon..._

_All of a sudden, the roaring of the thrusters stopped, and so did the shrieking of the tortured metal, replacing the deafening noise with an odd silence. __The fuel had burned out. Her spacecraft was now completely left at the mercy of the winds. Sverak released her grip on the arm rests. The ground was still rushing by beneath her at considerable speed, but her descent was slow. The nose pointed slightly upwards. Sverak relaxed ever so slightly. At worst, she would leave a big furrow in the sand and hop a few dunes. It would be a rough ride nevertheless, but with some luck Starfleet might even be able to salvage the spacecraft._

_She was completely unprepared when the ship suddenly vaulted and its nose was pushed downwards. Sverak watched helplessly as the ground came up to meet her at a horrible speed and they crashed._

_When she regained consciousness again, it was to Noah's urgent whispers beside her ear. "Don't move! Help is on its way! For god's sake, don't move!"_

_Sverak opened her eyes. It took her some effort to adjust her eyes, but then Noah's face swam into focus. Behind him she saw the ragged metal, the twisted struts, the smoking consoles. Nothing left to salvage. Sverak briefly wondered if this would be put on her expense account. Other sensations began to register. Mostly pain, which she did her best to suppress. Noah stared at her mutely, and Sverak could sense the dread he felt and that his face tried not to show. Somewhere, some fluid trickled out of the broken shell of her spacecraft. Sverak heard every drop hit the floor. For a fleeting moment she imagined it to be her blood trickling out of her body. Then, the silence was interrupted by the sound of a transporter beam. Noah turned his head, and Sverak felt his relief._

_"The medical emergency team has just arrived. They'll take care of you and you'll be fine."_

"And thankfully, he was right," Sito said, giving Sverak a half-smile.

Sverak nodded. "It was strange, though. My transfer to Enterprise came up shortly after I was released from Starfleet medical, and at that point no conclusion had been reached yet as to what exactly had gone wrong. I have not received any notifications in the meantime, so I presume that investigations are still ongoing."

Sito put her hands onto the table. "Believe me, they're treating this with the consideration it deserves, at least that was my experience. But you know what? It's getting late. I have to talk to my roommate first but I hope she'll be fine with the switch. If she is, we can go and see the quartermaster... and then we get to see how this particular choice turns out!"


	9. Interlude

_Nitpicking note: I know that the events in the episode Genesis technically occur after the episode Lower Decks but I don't care..._

* * *

Over the course of the next weeks, Sverak came to realize that she had not only gotten a new roommate but a whole new circle of friends that came with it. In Sito she had found also a kindred soul for Klingon battle holodeck simulations. She learned Standard slang and poker from Sam Lavelle and tried to teach him basic Vulcan in return, she appreciated Alyssa Ogawa for her kindness and compassion. Taurik was the first Vulcan who tolerated her occasional displays of emotions. She still had to take lessons in mind exercises with Dr. Selar, but she could and did join Taurik regularly for meditations.

Personally, Sverak thought that this was all a little bit too good to be true, and that's what she told Kim, who, predictably, told her to stuff her pessimism where the sun did not shine. This left Sverak with entirely too many options in the vastness of space, and she said so. Kim was forced to elaborate.

"Is this another of these Human customs?"

"No, Sverak, it really is not. But I'm happy for you."

Of course, there were some setbacks.

* * *

"Get that cat down, and fast!" Geordi shouted. He was standing next to the huge warp-core, still off-line. In order to get it fully operational, he theoretically only had to realign some couplings. Theoretically.

A huge shadow could be seen every now and then, roaming the gallery. Whenever someone tried to access the gallery, the huge cat-shaped animal gave off an ear-shattering roar that quickly discouraged the person from venturing any further. Every time they tried to stun the animal it would displace itself with frightening speed, so quickly that only a blur was discernible to the human eye. They were afraid of using anything more lethal for fear of doing serious damage to the unfortunate crewmember who was yet to be returned to his original shape.

Geordi was exasperated. He slapped his badge.

"Captain, we have a problem."

* * *

Main engineering was almost deserted, except for two people standing beside the dark warp core and one large cat guarding the gallery.

Sam looked up. The big cat was standing absolutely still, now that almost everyone had left the area. Its tail swung lightly from left to right, then ceased to move except for the tip which twitched slightly.

Then Sam started to talk. As soon as the cat heard his voice, a deep growl emanated from its throat, first growing louder, then softer again until it had subsided completely. Sam was still talking. Under the worried gaze of Alyssa Ogawa he started for the elevator, walking slowly and never averting his gaze from the animal. The cat stood transfixed, her eyes and her head following his every move. Then the lift set into motion, transporting Sam to the gallery. When the lift stopped, Sam remained where he was. He crouched to be on the same level as the cat. The cat was still staring him, with eyes hinting at the intelligent being trapped in the body. Maybe there even was some sort of understanding. Sam counted on it. He kept his gaze locked with the cat's, then crept forward, hand stretched out. The animal still did not move and watched his movements with something akin to curiosity.

Then, he had reached the animal. His hand reached out. He froze for a few seconds, still talking softly. The cat did not move. Slowly, ever so slowly he let his had drop onto the big flat head. His fingers found soft, silky fur to dig into. The cat remained perfectly still as Sam stroked its head, then the back right to the long tail. Muscles rippled under his touch. The tail twitched.

With a small sigh, the animal lowered itself onto the floor and let itself be petted.

Finally, Sam stood up. The cat rose to its feet, staring at Sam with a questioning gaze. He turned to walk back to the elevator, gazing over his back at the cat. It understood the silent command and followed, staying at his side all the way down and across the floor to where the doctor was standing.

Sam kept his hand firmly on the head of the big cat, when Alyssa Ogawa pointed her scanner at the animal. Her mouth curled into a smile.

"It's Taurik. We were right."

They both grinned.

"I always knew that there was a cat in every Vulcan", Alyssa remarked drily.

"We can get him back to your quarters, administer the antidote and give him some hours. That should do it."

Sam acquiesced with a slight nod and tapped his communicator. "Ensign Lavelle to Engineering. We have the cat but it might be best if we could have all corridors and lifts from Main Engineering to Ensign Taurik's quarters cleared."

Lieutenant La Forge's voice came through. "Understood. We'll inform you when we're ready."

Absentmindedly, Sam fingered for his PADD while he continued to pet the cat, which had sat back on its haunches, looking around with interest. He mentioned Alyssa to stand by the other side of what had become of his Vulcan cabin mate, then raised the PADD. "Smile, everyone!"

When the confirmation finally came through, he looked down at the animal that had remained at his side.

"Taurik, you'll never hear the end of this if I have anything to say in the matter."

The small procession started down the deserted hallways.

* * *

Two ensigns and one cadet were staring at a huge, primordial cat snoring it off on one of the beds in Sam's and Taurik's joint quarters. Sito gave a sigh. "Impressive. Sverak, why did Taurik manage to evade capture while you've been you usual cheerful self for at least the last hour when I was feeling a bit more Bajoran and less lizard-like?"

Sverak lifted her eyes from her fruit salad, looking shifty. Sam laughed. "It's because she got the short twig of the Vulcan evolutionary tree and turned into a pink, fluffy fruitbat."

Sverak made a face. "Look at the Pygmy Marmoset suddenly talking. Even as a fruitbat I was more fierce."

Sito, trying to picture this and failing, snorted. Sam gave Sverak a lazy smile. "You were throwing a hissy fit because you could not find any purchase on the ceiling and we had to get you a perch to hang down from before you calmed down enough so that we could give you your shots. But I do have really cute pictures of Lieutenant Kurr scratching you behind your ears as you are dangling face-down from the ceiling."

Sverak gave him a long stare. "The only reason why you were in a position to take pictures of those less fortunate was because you threw yourself at Commander Riker, quivering like a leaf, as soon as he came into Ten Forward. Easy way to get your shots, for sure."

Sam smiled and whipped out his PADD in retaliation to show Sito exactly what Sverak had looked like. Sito make suitably impressed sounds, then looked back at Sverak, who was still munching steadily. "You were considerably more cute than you are now. Sverak, what are you eating? Are you sure that all of your fruitbat gene sequences have been purged?"

Sverak rolled her eyes, her new favorite Human expression, and popped a grape into her mouth. "At least I still had a limbic system. And I'll have you know that my ears were bigger thank Taurik's." They looked at the cat, which seized the moment to let off a big snore, ears twitching. Sam smiled again and raised the PADD to take more pictures as prime blackmail material.


	10. Towards the future, part 1

"Incoming message from Starfleet Command, sir." Worf looked up from his console. "It's private."

Picard rose from his seat on the bridge. "I'll take it in my ready room."

He crossed the bridge, entered his sanctuary and sank into the much more comfortable seat behind his desk. At a touch of his finger, the screen of the computer terminal mounted on his desk flickered to life, and the familiar blue-white logo of Starfleet appeared, only to be replaced with the head and torso of Admiral Tyler a second later.

"Greetings, Jean-Luc", the Admiral said, without much enthusiasm.

"Greetings to you as well", Picard replied smoothly.

"A few days ago, the USS Hood got some very interesting readings when she was patrolling along our side of the Romulan Neutral Zone in Sector 489", the Admiral began without further preamble. "The energy readings show an energy signature characteristic to Romulan devices and were located in the DeghwI'Qagh system. Your orders are to proceed to the system immediately and begin an investigation."

He paused long enough for Picard to interject.

"That system's name has become familiar to me as of late. Is there any connection to the cadet I have aboard?"

Admiral Tyler stared his usual disapproving stare from the vidscreen. "Well, obviously, since she was involved in the system at some point in her life. But Cadet Sverak is not the only Vulcan who has spent time in the Romulan empire and then come back to tell the tale. Three other Vulcan children, who had originally been on DeghwI'Qagh, were surrendered to Starfleet at some point. One of them died under mysterious circumstances approximately one year ego. We have reason to believe that an attempt on Cadet Sverak's life was made only a few months ago. Starfleet Intelligence believes that trouble is brewing and we've put you in a good position to handle it. Keep me informed."

The screen went dark. Picard sighed. This was typical of Starfleet after Wolf 359. A certain paranoia had remained from that fateful encounter with the Borg that had brought Starfleet to the brink of destruction. The military side of Starfleet had gained ground at the expense of the exploratory one. Information still did not flow as freely as it had before. And even such a piece of information, which could not have done harm to anyone but which would have provided Picard with a certain measure of understanding, had been withheld until now.

"Cadet Sverak to my ready room."

* * *

"This is not normally a situation where a cadet should be in any way involved, but Starfleet has not given us much choice in this matter. Cadet, I've called you here because we are en route to the DeghwI'Qagh system to investigate possible signs of Romulan involvement. We do not have much information at this point but it is a situation where Starfleet feels your presence on board Enterprise could prove to be vital."

Sverak looked at the fish, which was still swimming around aimlessly in its bubble aquarium in space, and felt just as out of her element as the aquatic creature. So she looked back at Captain Picard, whose face wore an expression that was serious but not unkind.

"With all due respect, sir, I only spent the first three years of my life on that planet. The few memories that I have are unlikely to add any valuable insights. What am I expected to contribute, sir?"

"For the time being I want you to be present for the mission as an observer. I would like to ask you to share with us any piece of information that you think could be pertinent. At this point we know so little that any theory about the role a possibly Romulan device could have played in the system is pure speculation. We will share the sensor data that does exist with you in a minute. Before we do I would like to remind you that all facts pertaining to this mission are strictly confidential and should not be shared with anyone."

Picard looked at her questioningly, and Sverak replied with the obligatory "Yessir."

* * *

Sverak eyed the display on one of the rear consoles of the bridge. When the moon orbiting DeghwI'Qagh III had broken into pieces, the planet's rotation had become instable, and the planet itself had eventually been torn apart. At the place where the planet would have been orbiting the sun there was now a huge smear of debris which, over the millenia, would eventually form an asteroid belt around the sun.

The sensors of the Enterprise had focussed on one particular piece of planetary debris. Long range sensors produced a visual of the rock that was slowly tumbling through space, superimposed it on the overview of the planetary system and displayed the relevant sensor data at its side.

The huge piece of rock on the screen looked perfectly ordinary to the eye, but when Data touched some keys the image shifted to display energy signatures emanating from the asteroid.

Sverak raised an eyebrow. Whatever it was, it was not Starfleet, but it looked Romulan to her, and she said so.

"We will be in close range of the system in about fifteen hours", Picard said. He was standing slightly apart from the group that was crowding around the display. "Do the sensors give any indication as to what this device is, Mr. Data?"

"Negative, sir", the android answered. "It is highly doubtful that we will be able to maneuver the ship close enough to the asteroid to get a conclusive answer to that question, captain."

Picard nodded, not seeming the least bit surprised. "Very well. Number One, as soon as we have reached the asteroid field, take a shuttle, assemble an away team and take a closer look."

Riker's mouth turned into a pleased grin. Sverak had heard of his reputation as a shuttle pilot and imagined that he had to look forward to the challenge.

"Yes, Captain. Commander Data, Cadet Sverak, meet me in Shuttlebay One at 0645 hours. Cadet Sverak, you're on alpha shift and bridge duty until further notice. Report to Lieutenant Commander Data for the time being."

* * *

Sverak spent the rest of the alpha shift manning one of the aft stations of the bridge and performing long-range sensor scans that, however, did not show anything out of the ordinary. The bridge was quiet - Enterprise was in Warp transit on a direct course to the DeghwI'Qagh system. When alpha shift was over, Sverak was left with a lot to think about and she planned to address this in her next meditation.

Poker during beta shift in Sam's and Taurik's quarters proved to be inadequate as a disctraction. Sverak was not particularly good at the game when her shields were rigorously enforced and refused to cheat on general principles, so her involvement in the game was based on the calculation of mathematical possibilities, which left her as much at a disadvantage as it did Taurik.

"I heard we're headed for the Romulan Neutral Zone", Sam said, while dealing another round of cards.

Sverak picked up hers and said nothing.

"Anything interesting come up on astrometrics' long-range sensors, Sverak?"

Sam was like a Le-matya with prey, he would not let go.

"I would not know, I have been temporarily assigned to other duties."

Sam's eyes bulged. "Is that a coincidence?"

"I have been told that this is in the context of a classified mission and I am unsure whether I am allowed to tell you even that much so please refrain from asking any more questions."

Sam nodded. "I see. Well, I hope that you can tell us about afterwards." He finished dealing the cards, then looked expectantly into the round. "Let's hear your bets."

After the game, Sito and Sverak walked back to their quarters.

"So we're on the same duty schedule for the moment?"

"It would appear so."

"I do not want to know any details about the mission, Sverak, I just want to know how you feel about this... or if there is anything for you to worry about."

Sverak knew very well that divulging details of her knowledge of Romulan culture or her life on Romulus should not even begin to put her in any kind of conflict. She had left Romulus at a young age, certainly too young to have learnt any secrets that the Tal Shiar, the Romulan intelligence service, would prefer to have kept privileged. Still, she had to admit that it left her with a slight feeling of unease. She was aware of the fact that every bit of information she gave would be used against the Romulans and that responsibility was hers to bear. She also knew that the value of the information that she had was, in all likelihood, negligible, but she could not foresee all future repercussions from divulging something that seemed innocuous today but could become crucial in the future. Her duty to Starfleet was clear, however, and she said so to Sito.

"I know what the right thing to do is in this situation and I will do it."

"Are you in any danger?"

"I do not think so, but I could be wrong in that assessment."

And maybe this was a test? But Captain Picard had not seemed deceitful in their interactions, although Sverak had kept her shields firmly up and blocked out all sensations from her commanding officer. Were the roles of the participants reversed, it would not be beyond the Romulans to test her loyalties. Was Starfleet similar? Did they set this situation up? It seemed ridiculous to do that for a cadet, if they were unsure they could simply have rejected her applications. When she brought up her concerns with Sito, the ensign just smiled and shook her head.

"You sound as paranoid as Starfleet Intelligence, Sverak. Just do what you think is right... you'll have to live with the consequences, anyway."

* * *

Sverak's eyes flew open to darkness. Not even fully comprehending what had startled her from her meditation, she jumped up and put on her uniform. She left her quarters and ran through the empty corridors of Gamma shift in the direction of Ten Forward. Emotions in her head that did not come from this ship but from a point out there in space. From the Neutral Zone.

Sverak entered a Turbolift. "Ten Forward", she hissed.

She dropped her mental shields. The jumble of minds and thoughts on Enterprise was almost overwhelming, but there were other minds much further out, different minds. One of those was all too familiar.

Sverak left the turbolift in a straight run, jumped through the doors of Ten Forward even before they had fully opened and ran to the huge windows. Near the beginning of alpha shift, Ten Forward was practically empty. The lights in Ten Forward had been dimmed to a very low level, and Sverak had no trouble looking outside. Only stars, and some asteroids.

"So you've felt it too", a voice said from behind.

Sverak turned slowly to face Guinan. "Yes. They are coming to meet us." The voices were more clear now. Sverak felt a small surge of anticipation go through her, and she relished the sensation of touching minds with a texture so familiar and yet so alien. It could only be a matter of minutes now. They waited in silence.

Then space rippled in front of Enterprise, like a veil drawn from a precious exhibit by careful fingers, to reveal the graceful, curving features of the Romulan Bird of Prey.


	11. Towards the future, part 2

The ship sprang to yellow alert only seconds later. But this still left Sverak with the responsibility of informing someone about what she knew. She slapped her communicator.

"Cadet Sverak to Lieutenant Commander Data."

It took a few minutes for Data to respond - he had to be busy, and Sverak's call had to have been delegated to the bottom of the list.

"Cadet Sverak, please report to the bridge."

Sverak said good-bye to Guinan and smiled with a courage that she did not feel, then left Ten Forward to go to the bridge. When she arrived, the senior command team had already assembled. She joined Lieutenant Commander Data, who was standing with Captain Picard, Commander Riker and Counselor Troi on the lower level of the bridge. Captain Picard acknowledged her with a nod, then turned back to Worf, who was manning communications.

"Have they tried hailing us?"

Worf shook his head.

"No."

Captain Picard turned to Sverak

"You commed Lieutenant Commander Data. Cadet, if you have any insight to offer, now would be the time."

Sverak swallowed. "I have reason to suspect that the Commander of the Romulan warbird is Commander Harradeth, who is... was... my Romulan foster father."

Picard nodded, his face impassive. "What gives you reason to suspect this?"

"I am a fairly sensitive empath for a Vulcan. I can feel him if I drop my shields. While my abilities have never been truly tested at this range, I have no reason to doubt my senses at this point."

"Can he sense you?"

"His latent telepathic abilities are strong for a Romulan. He could usually sense me when I tried to project strong feelings to him. I do not know if he can sense me now."

Picard sighed and turned to his first officer. "And what do we make of this, of the presence of one Romulan warbird a hair's breadth away from the Federation border?"

Riker scowled. "My suggestion would be to wait for them to make the first move and send out the shuttle in the meantime. The two incidents are correlated."

Worf looked up from his station. "We're being hailed."

"And so much for that thought", Riker muttered under his breath.

"Put them on screen, Mr. Worf. Zoom image to my face only. Interrupt the transmission on my signal."

Sverak involunarily held her breath, when the familiar face materialized on the big viewscreen. Her Romulan foster father looked exactly as he had when she had last seen him.

"Greetings, Captain Picard of the Federation Starship Enterprise. I am Commander Harradeth of the Romulan Warbird Darax."

"Greetings to you as well", Picard acknowledged.

"It has come to our attention that debris has recently been drifting into Federation space from inside the Romulan Neutral Zone."

"How interesting. We are sending a shuttlecraft to examine the situation more closely."

"Perhaps we could dispatch a smaller spacecraft as well and join our forces in investigating."

The transmission broke up into static. Picard turned to Sverak. "Can you try to make yourself known to him? What are his intentions?" Sverak dropped her shields, accessed a memory of herself racing against her adoptive sister on a Hlai on the plains of Rator III, and tried to project every ounce of joy that she had felt that day into space, towards the Romulan that she had called her father. She saw Counselor Troi take a step back from the corner of her eye and almost recoiled herself at the mix of joy, regret, hope and fear that she felt emanating from him. She raised her mental shields again. "It's... complicated. I cannot say what his intentions are but he has recognized me."

Picard turned to Counselor Troi questioningly. She sighed. "I feel a strong jumble of conflicting emotions. There is no hostility directed at us but I would advise to remain cautious."

The signal was restored and Picard smiled. "There seems to be static interference in our signal, I do apologize for the interruption. You're welcome to launch a shuttlecraft but I would like to remind you and your shuttle pilot of the fact that entering Federation space with it could and would be taken as a sign of hostile intentions."

Commander Harradeth nodded. "I see. Maybe we can re-evaluate the situation once we all have more data."

The transmission ended. Picard stared at the viewscreen for a few more seconds, as if lost in thought, then turned to the small group still standing nearby. "Number One, Data, Cadet... see what you can find out once you take a closer look."

* * *

Commander Riker was an extremely skilled pilot, Sverak realized, as he navigated the shuttle through the debris field towards the asteroid from which the energy signature still emanated. She was making sure that the shuttle's sensors had a continuous lock on the energy signature, while Commander Riker and Lieutenant Commander Data were occupying the two front seats. Sverak also kept an eye on the small Romulan spacecraft that was navigating the debris field within the Romulan Neutral Zone - undoubtedly to come as close as the boundaries of Federation space would allow. From time to time, a soft collision alert sounded, but the debris never came close enough to touch the shuttle's shields. Nonetheless, Sverak was grateful for their existence.

Sverak relished the peaceful silence that remained unbroken until they reached the particular piece of debris that housed their little mystery piece of technology. She felt no emotions from Lieutenant Commander Data and only quiet determination from Commander Riker.

Commander Riker brought the shuttle to a relative stop relative to the asteroid, and Lieutenant Commander Data engaged the scanner routines that probed the device with every sensor at their disposal. The resulting data feed was routed through Sverak's console, and she took a first look at the high resolution images. What she saw confirmed her first impression: the device seemed to be of Romulan origin. Further sensor data showed her that the device was based on duotronic rather than isolinear circuitry, which, together with the age of the device, was enough evidence for Sverak to state her verdict.

"I strongly believe this device was built by Romulans."

"I concur", Data immediately agreed.

"Can we find out from here what its intended purpose was?" Interestingly, Commander Riker did not even want to know how they had reached this particular conclusion but that, Sverak supposed, would become relevant for the mission report later on. It was Data who answered.

"Not at present, I suggest to beam the technology aboard and conduct a more thorough investigation on Enterprise."

"Proceed. I'll keep an eye on our friends out there."

This resulted in a soft cascade of console beeps, and as Lieutenant Commander Data was busying himself with carrying out his orders, Sverak had ample time to study the rapidly growing data set still being accumulated on the device. She focused on having the computer analyze the mangled circuitry from whatever sensor input it could scrape together and try to find partial matches to standard circuits in the database. As the search was performed, Sverak brought up another scan of the Romulan shuttle's position and found that it had moved to within an inch of the Neutral Zone boundary closest to their own position. She checked on their activity.

"The Romulan shuttle crew is performing scans of their own."

"We let them", Riker replied, "It's always been something of a sore point for either side but it is not explicitly forbidden by the current treaty."

Sverak nodded to herself, then frowned as she took a closer look at the scanner pattern.

"Sir, instead of doing continuous low-energy scans, their scanning pattern consists of a sequence of high-energy bursts. However, those bursts are not precisely targeted at the machinery but at a point very close to it. If it was not for the faulty targeting I would think they were trying to overload the device's remains and destroy it in the process."

Riker's scowl was evident in his voice when he replied. "Data, how far along are you with the extraction?"

Lieutenant Commander Data's voice was monotonous in its reply. "I have a lock on the device but I would like to make certain that we extract all pieces that are left of it and some of the asteroid's minerals are interfering in the precision scan. At this stage I estimate that it will take me another two point eight minutes to complete the task."

"Carry on. Cadet, keep me updated if the scanning parameters change."

It was a terse silence this time, but Lieutenant Commander Data's time estimate was accurate to the decimal point. Two point eight minutes after his announcement, a metallic sound announced the device's arrival on the shuttle's transporter platform.

Riker gave an almost inaudible sigh. "All right. So let's have another closer look at our friends out there because they were trying to annoy us there. What is the status of their scans?"

The scanning pattern had changed almost as soon as the device had been successfully removed from the asteroid. A low-energy continuous scan continued to sweep the vicinity of the Romulan shuttle, but there was a very short-range scanning pattern on top of it.

"The pattern has changed, sir, there are now irregular modulations around a continuous scan. They are using their short-range scanners to modulate and we cannot detect the pattern very well at this point."

"We're getting closer, Cadet. Continue to monitor. Data, take a look at the signal and let's find out what they are doing."

They did not have a large distance to cover, and the scanning pattern became more easily discernible as they approached the Romulan shuttlecraft. Sverak and Data worked together, quietly exchanging strategies to decode any meaning in the pattern, working on the hypothesis that it was a communication attempt from the Romulan side, and it was Data who, when treating it as a Klingon subspace audio transmission protocol, managed to transform the signal into a computer-generated audio transmission.

"Federation shuttlecraft, please respond. Federation shuttlecraft, please respond..."

And just at that moment, Sverak obtained a match of her own from her earlier search.

"Sir! I have partial identification of the circuitry used in the device we just recovered!"

Commander Riker swiveled in his chair to face her. "Let's have it, Cadet."

"I have one partial match for a large-distance communication relay with a probability of 74.3 % and another partial match for a cloaking device control circuit with a probability of 47.1 %."

Commander Riker's expression became stony. "Data, prepare modulating our scanner systems to transmit in the same way the Romulans do. Keep this on standby. Cadet, while there is a considerable margin for error here, your data makes it look as if we have just discovered something that the Romulans do not necessarily want us to find. Prepare the data for a high-compression and high-encryption transmission to Enterprise and send it as soon as you are able to. Inform me if you have reason to believe that there is anything interfering with the transmission."

Sverak confirmed, then quickly assembled the most relevant data and started transmitting the information with the strongest encryption she could access. After only a few seconds, she received an equally heavily encrypted confirmation from Enterprise that they had started receiving the data.

"Enterprise confirms that they are receiving data", Sverak said.

Riker nodded. "Let them confirm every five minutes that the signal is still live. Data, how far along are you with the scanner modulation?"

"System is up and ready. Standing by, sir."

"Good. In that case, put me on audio. They've knocked, let's answer."


	12. Towards the future, part 3

_Almost done... and thank you for the reviews, while this is unapologetically a story for me, I am tickled pink that you like it, I truly am! Stay safe out there!_

"Commander Riker of Shuttlecraft Orinoco to unknown shuttlecraft: Identify yourself and state your purpose."

It took a few seconds, but the computer voice was cut off, there was a brief burst of static, and then an answer.

"This is Commander Harradeth. I would like to talk."

There was no face on the screen this time but when Sverak heard the voice she had to look down for a few seconds to compose herself. When she looked up again and towards the front of the shuttle, she saw Commander Riker's eyes on at her while he spoke.

"By all means, Commander, let's talk."

"By now, you have secured a piece of technology and you will undoubtedly analyze it to find out what it was intended to do. You might have suspicions already and they are probably correct. I am not here for that."

Riker's eyes widened. "All right. What are you here for?"

"You have a passenger on Enterprise who is part of my family. Fate, it seems, has made our paths cross again... or judicious planning on behalf of Starfleet. In any case, this is an opportunity I am unwilling to miss."

Riker's gaze on her became more searching, and Sverak swallowed but kept her silence.

"The passenger is a Starfleet cadet and she is on board our shuttle."

"This makes it easier than I had hoped. I am choosing this method of communication because there is negligible chance that it will be detected by the Tal Shiar but we have very little time. When Sverak was removed from our care, we had no say in this and we would never have given her up willingly. If there is a way for her to come back to us and if this is something she wishes to do then I would like to take her with me."

"Is this even a possibility? What about the Tal Shiar, wouldn't they brand Sverak as a traitor? And you and your family along with her?"

"My family's position is strong. I am confident that this is something that can be dealt with at this time."

Riker sighed. "Let me discuss this with her. I'll let you speak to her in a minute."

"Very well."

Data cut the signal, and once again, static filled the interior of the small shuttle.

Sverak felt as if she had turned to stone inside. She could only stare at Commander Riker, while she felt incapable of saying a single word.

Riker sighed again. "I have to say, this is a somewhat unexpected turn of events."

Lieutenant Commander Data turned to face Sverak but addressed his question to Commander Riker. "Would it even be possible for the Cadet to return?"

Riker started to look slightly constipated. "How the hell should I know, this is without precedence if you ask me. But in these cases we usually get to make our own rules. How Starfleet would react to it is another matter." He paused, then looked at Sverak again.

"At this point I should probably ask you, Cadet. What is it that you would want?"

Sverak remained silent. Riker continued to look at her, not unkindly.

"It's a cruel thing to ask but it would be crueller not to. Leave aside all political implications for the moment. Which choice would you feel most comfortable with?"

Sverak felt torn most of all. The conversation with Sito came to her mind, and she had spoken the truth then. She was not sure whether she would be able to adapt once again to the Romulan way of life. It had been easier before, with no alternative possible and no questions to ask. But then again, it was not as if she had truly found a home on Vulcan, and Starfleet... it came with good and bad things, and while Sverak felt that there was a tentative possibility of finding her place here, that outcome was by no means a certain one.

"It is... difficult to say, Commander."

"Then let's take the political implications into account for a minute. Do you share Commander Harradeth's view that his political clout is enough to shield you from possible repercussions?"

"This is possible and I trust Commander Harradeth to tell me the truth. But it is also true that it could change tomorrow. It is not unusual for families to fall out of favor... and then bounce back again as the political tides change."

It was Lieutenant Commander Data who spoke next.

"Cadet. I have found that many sentient species find guidance when listening to the experiences of other people who might have been in a similar situation. I joined Starfleet because I was discovered and reactivated by Starfleet personnel. In a way, I owed them my existence as it is now. But some members of Starfleet also tried to have me declared their property in order to be able to experiment on me. The final ruling was in my favor but I had to ask myself whether it was prudent to remain part of an organization that had tried to deny me my existence as a sentient and free being. I ultimately decided to remain because I believed that the good within Starfleet outweighed the bad and that I could actively make a difference by promoting the good."

"Really?" Riker seemed surprised at that revelation.

"Yes, sir, that and the fact that my position on Enterprise is uniquely challenging and provides me with experiences I would otherwise never have."

"Do you think that you have made the right decision?"

"Yes, cadet, I do think that."

And Sverak found that while she was mourning her childhood past that could have been she was not actually convinced that Romulus could offer her a better future. If Lieutenant Commander Data was right, then there was hope for her in Starfleet and she could base her choice on this.

"Thank you for this insight, Lieutenant Commander Data. It does help. And I am convinced that going forward is almost always preferable to going backwards. I do hope that I will at some point be equally equanimous about my choice of remaining where I am."

She could not be sure that her decision would withstand scrutiny at later times, but it was the only one she could make at that moment... and that would have to be good enough.

"I would like to speak to Commander Harradeth myself now, Sir."

Riker nodded. "Data, put her on."

"This is Sverak."

"Sverak!" There was no mistaking the joy in that voice. "When you were taken away I was furious, but no amount of scheming and plotting could get you back, _paenhe_. And believe me we tried. You are pursuing your love of the stars, I can see that. Have you been well?"

Sverak laughed. It seemed to startle both Commander Riker and Lieutenant Commander Data but even though she was sad about being given a choice when it was much too late to make a good one her joy at being given this opportunity was, for a moment, overwhelming. "It has been difficult at times, but not only for me. Relatives of my late Vulcan parents took me in until I left for Starfleet Academy. I am in my second year now. How are you faring? What is Kalesa doing?"

"We are well. She is training to command a starship and doing admirably. We are proud of her." _As we would have been of you_ was unspoken, and if Sverak was honest with herself it was this acceptance that she missed the most. But this was not the time and the place to voice her feelings, and Commander Harradeth continued. "Have you given my proposal some thought?"

"I have... _eneh_, I miss all of you and always will. But I'm not so certain of a future in the Romulan Empire for myself. Here, in Starfleet, I'll always be the Romulan for some and it has been and will be difficult, but I have also found acceptance in many places. On Romulus... you as my family accept me but I fear that hardly anyone else will, now, I have been away for too long. I will have to find my place here."

"Sveark, _paenhe_, I regret this. But I understand. I can only advise you: do not remain a pawn in this, be vigilant."

Sverak had to wonder at the implications of this statement, which was delivered with uncharacteristic intensity, but she replied truthfully. "I have no intention to do so."

She felt her throat closing up. This was it, the window of opportunity had passed and from then forward, she would have to remind herself that she was in Starfleet by her own choice. There was a moment of silence.

"Commander Riker, I will have to leave now and report back to High Command what you have discovered."

Riker cleared his throat. "Commander. I can only hope that there will be a place and time for us to meet under more favorable circumstances. But maybe this is something that we can work towards and maybe our recent mutual... mishaps... can even be an opportunity. While we are speaking frankly... I am puzzled by the fact that there is a piece of technology for us to find. If you did venture into Federation space those years ago to rescue the science team from the planet's surface, why didn't you just grab all of the incriminating pieces while you were at it?"

There was a pause, but at last an answer crackled through. "We tried to but only managed to recover parts of the device in the debris field. The rest was cloaked, so we left it. It was an acceptable risk at that time. And indeed, the cloaking failed only recently. When it did, we came but you were faster."

Another pause but Commander Harradeth had not finished. "It is also my hope that we can meet again, Commander Riker. Sverak, I will take my leave of you now. Farewell. You will be in our hearts and our minds."

Sverak swallowed and found her voice again.

"_Eneh_. Thank you. You will be in my heart and my mind, always. Tell... tell mother and Kalesa that. I treasure our memories. Farewell."

And with her words, the transmission died. The Romulan shuttlecraft pivoted, then accelerated towards Romulan space.

Sverak felt numb, as she fixed her gaze on the sensor output, thoughts reeling. Commander Riker's voice startled her.

"Cadet, stop staring at the screen and take a rest. This is an order."

And so she did, all the way back to Enterprise.


	13. Towards the future, part 4

"From what we have been able to piece together, the Romulans were testing a new kind of long-range cloaked surveillance probe. Those probes were designed to cover large distances and then bury themselves in the crust of some planetary body in an uninhabited star system. From there they would collect data and transmit it in highly compressed short bursts to the Romulan Empire. They would not only have been able to intercept highly focussed subspace transmissions with higher probability, they would also have been a secure destination for covert Romulan agents to send information to."

"But it did not work."

Riker shook his head. "No, this one didn't. DeghwI'Qagh III was a test system for the surveillance probe, close to the Neutral Zone and, thus, accessible in case anything did not go exactly as planned. But the Romulans had not anticipated the catastrophic failure that led to the destruction of DeghwI'Qagh III's moon and, as a consequence, to the destruction of the planet. They were unable to navigate the debris field and extract their prototype in time but they did try to rescue survivors on the planet surface."

"And then tried to kill them again if Starfleet's intelligence reports are anything to go by."

"We know that the Romulans are more or less deeply xenophobic, depending on which faction has the upper hand in the Senate. It was probably just a matter of politics, as callous as this may sound."

"How did our cadet take the news?"

"Stoic as a Vulcan, I have to say, considering the fact that so far, she has mostly been treated like the hot potato in all of this that noone really wants to touch. She has been as much of a means to an end for Starfleet as for Romulus, she can't be happy about that. Hell, I'm not happy about that." Riker looked at Picard. "I did offer her a choice."

Picard sighed. "You would truly have let her go? I would have made you not only write that mission report but also answer all of Starfleet's questions, Number One."

"At that point it only seemed fair to ask. Which noone else has ever done before. She does not know anything yet that Starfleet does not want to come to light. Commander Harradeth assured us that it would still have been feasible."

"But she obviously declined."

"She did. Which leaves the question what we do with her, now. Send her back to the academy? Keep her here?"

Picard pushed back from his desk. "Well, I can imagine that Starfleet will appreciate the leverage against the Romulans, especially so soon after the Pegasus incident. Cadet Sverak has already made herself useful once, I am sure she will make herself useful again, given the chance. I am unhappy that Starfleet not only pushed a cadet onto our ship without telling us about the true motives behind that decision, I am also unhappy about the fact that said cadet is effectively underage. Are we making a habit of letting adolescents join Starfleet now? I hope not. If she enjoys working the astrometrics gamma shift, she is free to do so for the rest of the year."

Riker smiled. "It will keep Lieutenant Kurr happy if nothing else, and that's not something that happens very often."

* * *

Sito clenched her fist. "The Romulans have destroyed a whole planet, eradicated a Vulcan science team with peaceful intentions and butchered your whole family. They abducted you! Then they tried to kill you when you were in Starfleet! I can't understand how you can take this so calmly."

Sverak sighed. They were sitting in their shared quarters, beta shift was coming to an end and Sverak had not yet been ordered back into astrometrics on gamma shift, so they would both need to rest soon. "I can regret the loss of life in general and I can strongly dislike the callous disregard for life in the interest of a perceived strategic advantage. But If it had not been for them, I would not be who I am and I would not be here now. _Kaiidth_. What is, is. I am glad that I was finally given the opportunity to say farewell to my Romulan foster father. This is one regret I have always had."

Inside, Sverak was less sanguine about her fate than she let Sito believe, and she also did not tell Sito how close she had come to accepting. But while Commander Harradeth and his family would have welcomed her with open arms, she was not so sure about the larger repercussions her return to the Romulan Empire would have caused. While Sverak still did not consider herself overly important in the grand scheme of things, the Tal Shiar was paranoia incarnate and noone could truly predict their reaction. And how could one even make such a decision in the space of at most five minutes? Ultimately, Sverak did not know whether she would have tried to go back to an idealized past and end up in a present with which, too, she no longer identified, and this was what had determined her decision. Sverak did not know whether, given more time to deliberate, her choice would have been different, but she had surprised herself with the depth of her yearning to be back in the one place she had truly felt welcome.

But Sito seemed to remain unconvinced. "Do you know what happens to you now?"

"I do hope that they will not expel me from Starfleet Academy."

Sito scoffed. "Come on, this would not make any sense."

"It is a possibility. I am underage by Vulcan standards, this could be grounds for at least suspending my attendance. I do not wish to go back to Vulcan, however."

And she would not, that much was certain, even if she did not tell Sito as much. But Sito, surprisingly, got up and hugged her, and Sverak was surprised again at the depth of the feelings this simple gesture evoked in her. So she smiled.

"I have been told to report to the ready room at the beginning of alpha shift. I imagine that this is one of the things I will find out."

* * *

Sverak was standing to attention in the ready room but already feeling much less apprehensive about this fact than the last two times.

"Cadet Sverak, Commander Riker reported to me that your performance in this mission was exemplary under circumstances that cannot have been easy for you. A commendation has been entered into your permanent file, but I feel that this is a bit beside the point here."

Picard paused.

"I strongly believe that the people on board this starship can only help Starfleet strive to be the best it can be if they are treated as people, not as pawns. Truth be told I am very displeased that in accepting you, Starfleet allowed an adolescent to join in what might have been a bid at winning a future power play. At this point, I also believe that your best interests have not been taken into account in a lot of the choices that have affected your life and that you were not allowed to make yourself. While this is not something that can be remedied, you have recently made a choice yourself that left you here, on Enterprise. This was intended to be a training opportunity, at least in part, and we can safely say that you have exceeded expectations. Your stay on board could end with that and you could go back to Starfleet Academy now and try to catch up with your peers.

"However, there is another possibility. I can reason with Admiral Brand and tell her that since your year is in all probability lost anyway she might as well extend your training cruise to the entire year. I can imagine that this gives you an opportunity to understand whatever you hope to gain from joining Starfleet."

Picard paused again. "The choice is yours."

Sverak briefly closed her eyes, feeling her relief as if it was a living thing. At least this one was easy.

* * *

"So you're staying for one whole year?" Sam looked surprised, but he was smiling. Once again, the five of them had assembled in Ten Forward. "I'm surprised Starfleet lets you."

Sverak shrugged. "It is too late to join the classes now. Besides, I'll be able to take exams for some courses on a starbase if we stop at one. And, most importantly, I do not wish to go back at this point. It has been... educational so far."

Sito just grinned. "Even Taurik has been known to admit that we are having fun. Let's drink to the rest of your year, then."

Four glasses were raised, four voices rang out, and Guinan smiled.


End file.
